SCENE:
The Council Room of the Futurist Sages, decorated in brilliant colors to suggest a battle of the minds at some far future date. The Sages are seated about the walls in a parabolic curve. They are costumed with appropriate inappropriateness. Green ears is in present day evening dress; Purple hair in fiery green robes; Blue face in a pink business suit; Yellow hat in a conventional futurist costume of mingled colors; Red sword in a black monk’s gown, with a sword in his rope girdle; White heart, who is young, in football armor.
Blue Face. Shall we give the woman a chance to defend herself?
Green Ears. Why should we? If her defense is good, we shall be prejudiced against her. And as we admit the rule of prejudice, the defense will lose its judicial character.
Red Sword. Judicial? Who wants to be judicial? I abolished that word last year.
Green Ears. That’s just the point. We hate the judicial; therefore if the defense loses its judicial character we may be forced to decide both ways at the same time. Acquit on the ground of illogical defense; convict on the grounds of prejudice against good defense.
Purple Hair. Red sword has abolished judicial. Well, we have also abolished the past; we have abolished all abolishments!
Yellow Hat. Above all, we must guard against precedent. Let us look up all previous trials, and take care to do the opposite.
White Heart. But again, that would entangle us in the past. I want to see the woman!
Red Sword. He wants to see the woman! He is a reactionary!
Purple Hair. Do not argue, brothers. For if we argue, we shall either settle the case by logic, which we repudiate, or by violence, so that we shall kill each other before we have a chance to decide about the woman.
Red Sword. Time server! I shall kill you all, and decide for myself.
Blue Face. Red cabbages, redness of blue cabbages, when breakfast is no cabbage in a potato. Cocoa crinkles!
Yellow Hat. He is right, brothers.
All. He is right.
Blue Face. We, who have exalted ourselves above all modes of thought, we who have cast aside all images and unfettered ourselves from all language and all sequence, we who have repudiated humanity; we have a right to fight a lower order with its own weapons. Caprice is our god; let us then have a caprice to judge this woman with logic and judicial procedure. Have you all this caprice?
All. We have.
Red Sword. I object: This is democracy.
Green Ears. We accept your objection, and act in opposition to it.
Blue Face. Then let the woman be brought in.
(White Heart goes out right and brings in the woman. She is tall, of beautiful face and figure, in a simple white Greek tunic. In her hair is a gold fillet. She is led to the center, where she is left standing, as White Heart resumes his seat.)
Blue Face. Deliver the charge, Red sword!
Red Sword (standing). You are charged, first, with being a woman. And as a woman you are the living incarnation of the past. You represent conservatism and the anti-military virtues; you clog the wheels of progress; you sap men’s energies and misdirect them from the triumphs of achievement to the service of material things—or immaterial things. Your effeminate beauty poisons art and furnishes countless photographic realists with the means of selling paintings. The love of you has vitiated poetry and music. Masquerading in the garments of caprice, you have deceived man into accepting the traditional. As Futurists we detest you. This is the first charge! (A pause.)
The Woman. You accuse me of being a woman. It is a grave charge. But first, in order that I may have a chance to disprove it, I suggest that you tell me what a woman is.
Green Ears. A woman is that whose place is in the home.
Purple Hair. A woman is that which is ruled by instinct.
Blue Face. A woman is that which is beautiful.
Yellow Hat. A woman is that which men call a mystery.
White Heart (rapturously). A woman is that which men love.
Red Sword (vehemently). A woman is that which men hate.
The Woman. These are your definitions?
Blue Face. They are.
The Woman. Then in order to prove that I am a woman you must prove that they describe me. And you must prove that there is nothing else in me.
Red Sword. We must prove nothing. We act.
The Woman. Then why do you talk?
Red Sword (heatedly). I deny that you are beautiful. And if you are beautiful, I deny beauty.
Yellow Hat. Is it not our caprice to be judicial? Come, Red Sword, do not descend to flattery!
Purple Hair. All our definitions have been proved a million times. They are unprovable.
The Woman. I admit them. What then? I will leave the home, I will learn logic, I will cut off my nose, I will tell you my mystery, and I will let your love and your hate kill each other. And I shall still be here.
White Heart. Then you will not be a woman, you will be a feminist!
The Woman. But I shall be I instead of what you think I am.
Red Sword. You can not be you unless you are what we think you are.
Blue Face. Brothers, can we kill the woman and spare the feminist?
White Heart. If you kill the woman you will make the feminist.
Yellow Hat. No; the feminist is more female than the woman. The feminist would inflict domesticity on the world. She wants all men for her husband. She wants to tie pink ribbons on siege guns and abolish the mountains to make room for the nursery. If we let the feminist live, man can no longer find a place in which to be alone with his adventure. If we let the feminist live we shall make the woman a giant. If we kill the woman we shall kill them both at the same time.
Green Ears. Show us the feminist without the woman.
The Woman. I will do so if you will cease to be men.
Blue Face. We have ceased to be men. We are supermen.
The Woman. Then you see the subwoman.
Red Sword (fiercely). We must kill what we see.
The Woman. But have I not shown you that I am something besides a woman?
Red Sword. You might show us that you are everything, and still I would hate you. Hate is not hate unless it exists for its own sake.
The Woman. At last you have spoken the truth. I am everything. And you hate me because you hate me.
Blue Face. Gentle pickles in a vacillating pink mound. Inkwell is not ink. Ink is not inkwell. Flying postman leathers purple letters.
The Woman. But I have reserved my best defence to the last. I am a descendant of Gertrude Stein!
Red Sword. Descendant! What heresy! Gertrude Stein had no descendants. She has ascendants!
Yellow Hat. Deliver the rest of the charge.
Red Sword. Be it known unto you that we are the sole surviving members of the human race. By a process of selection we have killed all except the best stock. You alone remain of the female sex. We charge you not only in your capacity as woman, but in your capacity as mother. In order to prove your right to live, you must justify mankind. We accuse you of being the perpetuator of human beings! Defend yourself!
The Woman. You are the sole surviving males?
Yellow Hat. We are.
The Woman. Then you may let me live. I shall not perpetuate the race.
White Heart. Do not despair; I will marry you!
Green Ears. Where are your manners? Has not Shaw taught us that women do the wooing?
Blue Face. What have we to do with Shaw? Let us be serious about frivolous matters.
Red Sword. She is not to be trusted. It is necessary for her to defend the race. Speak, woman!
The Woman. Now indeed you have given me a heavy burden. What could be brought forward as a defence for humanity? Why should anything exist?
Yellow Hat. Why, indeed? That is for you to show. For aeons life has perpetuated itself through a mere animal instinct. Yet through all that time consciousness has been growing; will has at last come into the ascendancy. Now for the first time man’s ego is really on the throne. For the first time man, with power to extinguish himself, can demand an adequate reason for his existence. And man is ready to hear the secret of the sphinx. We have come to you, madam, as the last and most perfect woman, as the final manifestation of the eternal mystery, to force you on pain of death to divulge yourself.
The Woman. But I thought mankind existed for the purpose of creating the superman.
Purple Hair. He did; but now he has created the superman. We are the embodiment of the purpose. What next?
Blue Face. As futurists we refuse to accept the old answer. If our existence merely pushes the problem forward a few generations, it is futile. If, on the other hand, we are the crowning goal of man’s endeavor, there is no need to create further.
The Woman. You are superchildren using superlogic. How can a reason come out of one who is ruled by instinct? How can a conservative satisfy a futurist? But I will answer you, and my answer is this: I am a female so that you may be males. I am a holder of traditions so that you may smash them. And I perpetuate the race so that you may ask the reason.
Red Sword. Come, come, this will not do. We are above the fogs of mysticism. We are talking of final things, and we must have a definite answer.
The Woman. Then make a definite accusation.
Purple Hair. We hold the human race guilty until it is proved innocent. We assume the position of an all-wise intelligence, as aloof from the earth as the farthest star. And we see a race of ant-things crawling on two legs and going through all sorts of meaningless antics. Why is one ant exalted? Because he has led an army which has killed a million other ants. Because he has discovered how to make ants live a few seconds longer. Because he has written a rhyme with ant-words or put a few senseless daubs on ant-canvas. And when the ant asked himself what his purpose was, he answered first, “To exist.” And his second answer was like the first: “To create something more like myself than I am.” There is no validity in these which a superior intelligence can recognize. What is the third answer?
Red Sword. Woman, defend yourself!
White Heart. Stop! I love the woman and I demand her (He jumps from his seat and embraces her).
The Woman. Here, O supermen, is your answer! Man exists for that which cannot be spoken, for that which cannot be thought. He exists for his mystery, for that which he loves, for that which he hates. Man exists for me!
Green Ears. And if he denies you?
The Woman. You cannot have your future without your past.
Red Sword. You see, I was right; we shouldn’t have listened to her. She is her own argument; and she has to bring in the past. Away with her!
Yellow Hat. Away with her; we exist for ourselves!
Blue Face. Remarkable apples, apple black, apple pink, blossom apples in squirming shrieks. Skyrockets deserve apples. Bang!
Red Sword. Stop using that antique language! I’m sick of it. It’s too obvious.
Purple Hair. Yes, we have proved that we can be more obscure in good English.
Red Sword. And now, brothers, the sentence! The execution!
All. The sentence, the sentence!
Red Sword. Stand aside, White Heart, or I will kill you both at the same time!
White Heart. I shall die with her!
Red Sword. You are not yet superman. We shall execute the last man and the last woman together. (To the woman) Have you any last words? It is traditional to have last words.
The Woman. I will match my silence against your silence, my eternity against your eternity!
Red Sword. Come with me! (He leads them out, right. There is an oppressive silence. In a moment he returns, wiping his sword on his gown. He takes his seat without a word. The light begins to fail, and the room grows rapidly darker until the last few sentences are spoken in an enveloping blackness.)
Green Ears. Man has produced the superman, and the superman has put an end to mankind.
Blue Face. Brothers, we stand on an icy mountain peak in the twilight of time.
Yellow Hat. We experience a breathless emotion which no one has had before, which there will be no more to have.
Purple Hair. No longer do we feel the drag of the past; no longer do we feel the lure of the future.
Red Sword. We are the future. We are the goal of consciousness.
Blue Face. For this moment has mankind dragged out a million weary years.
Green Ears. For this moment have been the countless joys of love, the countless pangs of death.
Yellow Hat. The thing-in-itself for which philosophers have sought—that is here.
Purple Hair. We have broken the spell of cause and consequence.
Red Sword. Will has won its first and its last victory over fate.
Green Ears. The stupid serpent of wisdom swallowing its own tail has grown great and finished the task.
Blue Face. Grubbing logic has looked into the mirror and discovered itself to be gigantic caprice.
Yellow Hat. Infinity has turned inside-out and become nothingness.
Purple Hair. The great contradiction has annihilated itself.
Red Sword. Let us keep silence before the solution of the ancient riddle.
(A long, dark silence. Slow curtain.)
There is something transitory in the moods evoked by rhyme. For rhyme shimmers on the surface of language like sunlight on the surface of a shallow stream; it conducts the mind as in a circle; its sphere is a world of harmonious delights. Rhyme is to the mind what sentimentality is to art.—Francis Grierson.
The Liberties of the People
William L. Chenery
Lord Valiant. The exercise of such tyranny over the minds of men has been productive, in a great degree, of the miseries that have fallen upon mankind. We have been happy in England since every man has been at liberty to speak his mind.
Medroso. And we are very quiet at Lisbon, where nobody is permitted to say anything.
Lord Valiant. You are quiet but you are not happy. Your tranquility is that of galley slaves who tug the oar, and keep time in silence. * * *
Medroso. But what if I find myself quite at ease in galleys?
Lord Valiant. Nay, in that case, you deserve to continue there.
—Voltaire.
Sunday afternoon, January 17, Chicago was given a vivid picture of the liberties allowed the people. On that occasion the freedom of assemblage and the right of free speech were ruthlessly and brutally denied a great host of people because forsooth they were poor and unemployed.
Men and women whose crime was that they could not find work had assembled at Hull House. After the meeting, it was suggested that a parade would impress their needs upon the city. Immediately they were attacked by the police, some of whom had been disguised in the tatters of unemployed men and scattered into the crowd. Young girls were beaten, women were knocked down, men were assaulted, and all in the name of law.
The assistant chief of police, Herman F. Schuettler, directed the official lawlessness. This exponent of anarchy detailed fifty mounted police to charge the assemblage of hungry men and women. And here is the explanation given by Schuettler:
“We expected something like this to happen. We had refused these people a permit and they took it upon themselves to violate the law. I have no fault to find with the conduct of the policemen. Of course they may have been a bit rough but I am sure they acted within their rights. They were obeying orders.”
And then, poltroon fashion, the anarchistic police attempted to conceal their stupid crimes and cruelties by stressing the fact that Mrs. Lucy Parsons, one of the philosophical anarchists of Chicago, was a speaker at the Hull House meeting! Could bureaucracy go further?
The episode is important because it is typical of what is going on all over the United States. It is a by-product of our undigested industrial order and also a promise of what the future has in store for us; it is the prophecy of a future feudalism which is rising like a flood and which will sweep us into impotency if we are not wise enough and strong enough to plan a sound reconstruction. From San Diego to Portland, from Los Angeles to New York, the fight is raging. In places the people have definitely lost all the rights and privileges of a supposed democracy. In Lead, S. D., in the Colorado coal fields, in parts of Montana, in parts of the Michigan copper country, in West Virginia, in Pennsylvania, and in Massachusetts, whole sections of the population have been degraded by forces too strong for them to a condition of servility. A servile people is not a threat of the future; it is a comment upon the present. And among the servile peoples, the liberties have perished. The question which now remains is only: “Is the remnant strong enough or disciplined sufficiently to regain the fundamentals of freedom which slipped away while we slept?”
It is not only the poor unemployed who have been battered about and made to cringe. Preachers and professors have also felt the stultifying constraint exercised by tired business men in moods of irritation. Howard Crosby Warren gave an appallingly lengthy list of professors who have been discharged from universities all over the land within the last two or three years because they exercised the most commonplace latitude in the choice of their sentiments and their pronouncements. A Florida professor had to forego his position because he doubted the finality of the wisdom of the ante-bellum teachers in the South. A professor at Marietta College, Ohio, was forced to resign because his political opinions were displeasing to his masters. A professor at Wesleyan was driven out on account of his opinion concerning the observance of the Sabbath. But why go on? The number is tediously inclusive.
So great has this evil become among teachers that an association of University professors was organized in New York in early January. From it college presidents and deans were expressly excluded. The members of the association, actuated no doubt by motives of middle-class respectability, announced that they were not to be considered a trade union; but, for all their dislike of the dignity of labor, they have found it necessary to fight as a body for the retention of the liberties essential to self-respect.
The attack on the Chicago unemployed, who made nothing like so much of a parade as the visitors to a ball park any summer afternoon, nor so much of a street jam as the fashionable attendants at a Mary Garden opera, illustrated the direction in which the attack is being made. The real government of men is industrial, and not political, as every one knows. Consequently the genuine tyrannies, or abuses of government, can be discovered naturally among the incidents of industry.
Dr. Annie Marion MacLean of Adelphi College, Brooklyn, read a living document upon this phase of the question at a conference held by the economic and sociological associations at Princeton during Christmas week. In the course of her investigation, says Paul U. Kellogg in his report of the meetings in The Survey, Dr. MacLean had been told by girls how their foremen had warned them against telling what their pay was, of loft building doors locked, of foul air, and what not. The head of an employer’s utopia had told her he would keep out unionism by making examples of the talk leaders. How? By firing them. She told of strikers suppressed by the police for what they said, while strikebreakers inside the factory, hurling insults at them from the windows, went unmolested. “Working women have the right to state the beliefs they hold without forfeit of their livelihood,” said she. “They need reassurance that liberty is more than a catch word. The box-maker, the bobbin girl, and the doffer have the right not only to life but to liberty and free speech in a land which is supposed to be the home of freedom.”
Professors are denied the right of free speech because colleges and universities are organized on business principles. Scholars and teachers are deprived of the franchise in all vital matters affecting university life. They are clerks. Tired business men are the masters of education, and tired business men have but one great principle: loyalty to the organization. Criticism seems sacrilege. Incidentally, that accounts for the fact that the great inventions in business have been made by outsiders; but that is not my story.
The same tired business men operating through the police take away the essential liberties from trade unionists, from the unemployed, from socialists, and from the I. W. W.’s when the occasion arises. The police acquire the habit of tyranny and then set to work to practice it on their own account. What reason under heaven could have persuaded Herman F. Schuettler to order an attack on hungry men and women, inoffensive, armed only with banners bearing fragments of the Lord’s Prayer? Surely a Christian litany is not an incitement to riot. “Give us this day our daily bread”—if this be treason, we may well pray for annihilation at the touch of some vagrant comet.
But the police are pawns in the great game of the modern world, the game of hide and seek for sovereignty. Blind and stupid, they do the occasional desires of their masters and then, filled by a lust for repression, go on to satiate their unwholesome appetites.
Hitherto I have assumed that the somewhat constitutional guaranties of free speech and free assemblage—the two go hand in hand—were actual rights. Theodore Schroeder, leader among the libertarians, has been prominent long among the small group which has ceaselessly stressed our fading freedom. Schroeder has an article in The Forum in which he makes a witty attack upon Comstockery and upon the censorship which has grown up in the Post Office Department—a censorship prudish and powerful enough to exclude the Chicago Vice Report from the mails. This censorship of the imagined obscene is puerile and petty in sufficiency for any appetite, but it is useless to discuss it here. The reaction is always more potent than the action where obscenity is charged, as witness our own September Morn. Schroeder, albeit, announces his freedom of speech to be “a natural and a constitutional right.”
Society, so far as I know, recognizes no natural rights and modern philosophy seems to sanction none. As for constitutional rights, every constitution, unless it be dead, is subject to amendment. The real foundation for the liberties of speech and assemblage is discovered in the social need for them. Without freedom the common weal withers and perishes. That, then, is the basis and incidentally it affords a rod by which any attempt at censorship, by the police, by factory foremen, by the post office, by university trustees, and even by a sluggish popular taste, may be measured.
If the powers of Olympus would lend to men some creature of infinite wisdom and taste, some creature versed in the weary evolutions of the past, and pregnant with the unformulated tendencies of the future through which an increasing happiness may be attained by men, then well might that creature assume a censorship of human thought and speech. But salvation cannot be won so lightly, for the seed of happiness is with men. No one lives, or has lived, with the power to say what idea was valuable to the world and what idea was baneful. The human substitutes which have been commissioned during the absence of this all-wise and all-prophetic authority have been uniformly dull, limited, and poisonous to the best hopes of the future.
Since, then, we may not have a wise authority, why not frankly face the situation? We blame the police, and justly, for their cruelties; yet upon them American society has imposed an impossible task. We have demanded free speech and free assemblage by our fundamental law, and privately we have told the police not to obey the constitution. Who’s at fault? New York knows. Last winter at Madison Square Garden the same sort of folly was enacted as that which disgraced Chicago on Sunday, January 17. Then Arthur Woods, police commissioner, saw a great light. He made an experiment in freedom. It worked hugely to his credit and, parenthetically, to the discredit of some of those most noisy in demanding the right. The emptiness of many of the speakers was exhibited and that was all. The existing order was unruffled.
As a result of his enlightenment Commissioner Woods made a request at the conference on the old freedoms held at Princeton: “Policemen are entitled to definite orders,” said the commissioner. “People in this country have the constitutional right to freedom of assemblage and freedom of speech. The police have not only the responsibility to permit it—but to protect them in its exercise, and the police should be so instructed.”
The police should be so instructed; the welfare of the race demands it. But they won’t get instructions until powerful organized groups of citizens find expression. Upon this organization rests the future.
A Hymn to Nature
(This fragment, a “Hymn to Nature,” unknown to us in the published works of Goethe, was found in a little bookshop in Berlin, and translated into English by a strong man and a strong woman whose lives and whose creations have served the ideals of all humanity in a way that will gain deeper and deeper appreciation.)
Nature!
We are encompassed and enveloped by her, powerless to emerge and powerless to penetrate deeper.
Unbidden and unwarned she takes us up in the round of her Dance and sweeps along with us, until exhausted we fall from her Arms.
She creates ever new Forms; what is, was never before; what was, comes never again—everything is New and yet ever the Old.
We live in the midst of her and are Strangers to her.
She speaks incessantly with us and never betrays her Secret to us.
We have unceasing Effect upon her and yet have no Power over her.
She appears to have committed everything to Individuality and is indifferent to the Individual.
She builds ever and ever destroys and her Workshop is inaccessible.
She is the very Children—and the Mother—where is she?
She is the only Artist.
With the simplest Materials she arrives at the most sublime Contrasts.
Without Appearance of Effort she attains utmost Perfection—the most exact Precision veiled always in exquisite Delicacy.
Each of her Works has its own individual Being—each of her Phenomena the most isolated Conception, yet all is Unity.
She plays a Drama.
Whether or no she sees it herself we do not know and yet she plays it for us who stand in the Corner.
There is an eternal Life, Growth and Motion in her and yet she does not advance.
She changes ever, no Moment is stationary with her.
She has no Conception of Rest and has fixed her Curse upon Inaction.
She is Firm.
Her Step is measured, her Exceptions rare, her Laws immutable.
She has reflected and meditated perpetually; not however as Man but as Nature.
She has reserved for herself a specific all-embracing Thought which none may learn from her.
Mankind is all in her and she in all.
With all she indulges in a friendly Game and rejoices the more one wins from her.
She practices it with many, so occultly that she plays it to the End before they are aware of it.
And most unnatural is Nature.
Whoever does not see her on every side, nowhere sees her rightly.
She loves herself and ever draws to herself Eyes and Hearts without number.
She has set herself apart in order to enjoy herself.
Ever she lets new Admirers arise, insatiable, to open her Heart to them.
In Illusion she delights.
Whoever destroys this in himself and others, him she punishes like the most severe Tyrant.
Whoever follows her confidently—him she presses as a child to her Breast.
Her Children are Countless.
To none is she everywhere niggardly but she has Favorites upon whom she lavishes much and to whom she sacrifices much.
Upon Greatness she has fixed her Protection.
She pours forth her Creations out of Nothingness and tells them not whence they came nor whither they go; they are only to go; the Road she knows.
She has few Motive Impulses—never worn out, always effective, always manifold.
Her Drama is ever New because she ever creates new Spectators.
Life is her most beautiful Invention and Death her Ruse that she may have much life.
She envelops Mankind in Obscurity and spurs him ever toward the Light.
She makes him dependent upon the Earth, inert and heavy; and ever shakes him off again.
She gives Needs because she loves Action.
It is marvelous how she attains all this Movement with so little.
Every Need is a blessing, quickly satisfied, as quickly awakened again.
If she gives another Need—then it is a new source of Desire; but soon she comes to Equipoise.
She starts every Moment upon the longest Race and every Moment is at the Goal.
She is Futility itself: but not for us for whom she has made herself of the greatest importance.
She lets every Child correct her, every Simpleton pronounce Judgment upon her; she lets thousands pass callous over her seeing nothing and her Joy is in all and she finds in all her Profit.
We obey her Laws even when we most resist them, we work with her even when we wish to work against her.
She turns everything she gives into a Blessing; for she makes it first—indispensable.
She delays that we may long for her, she hastens on that we may not be sated with her.
She has no Speech nor Language; but she creates Tongues and Hearts through which she feels and speaks.
Her Crown is Love.
Only through Love can we approach her.
She creates Gulfs between all Beings and all wish to intertwine.
She has isolated all that she may draw all together.
With a few Draughts from the Beaker of Love she compensates a Life full of Toil.
She is Everything.
She rewards herself and punishes herself, rejoices and torments herself.
She is harsh and gentle, lovely and terrible, powerless and omnipotent.
Everything is ever present in her.
Past and Future she knows not—The Present is her Eternity.
She is generous.
I glorify her with all her Works.
She is wise and calm.
One drags no Explanation from her by Force, wrests no gift from her which she does not freely give.
She is cunning but for a good purpose and it is best not to observe her Craft.
She is complete and yet ever uncomplete; so as she goes on she can ever go on.
To Everyone she appears in special Form.
She conceals herself behind a thousand Names and Terms and yet always is the same.
She has placed me here; she will lead me hence;—
I confide myself to her.
She may do with me what she will: she will not despise her Work.
I speak not of her. No, what is true and what is false; She herself has spoken all;
All the Fault is hers; hers is all the Glory.
My Friend, the Incurable
IV.
Pro domo mea: on the vice of simplicity. John Cowper Powys—a revelation
One of my critics sent me a New Year’s wish and admonition: “You are hectic. Why not see things as they are? You must learn to be simple.”
This is another attempt on the part of my good-wishers to cure me, in defiance of my resolute declaration that I cannot and do not want to be cured. Furthermore, I am in the position of a normal lunatic who considers the whole world, except himself, insane; not only do I refuse to learn the art of being simple, but I regard simplicity as a vice, a defect, a misery.
What is simplicity? I cannot define things; definitions are absurd, limiting, simplifying. In this case perhaps I ought to adopt the method of the school-boy who defined salt as “what makes potatoes nasty when not applied to.” It is an English joke which I have tried with discouraging results on the American sense of humor; it suits my purpose nevertheless. How would this do: “Simplicity is that which makes life dull when applied to?” No; decidedly, I cannot think in Procrustean formulas.
Nothing is simple. What nonsense it is to synonymize this word with “natural,” as if nature were not most complex and complicated! Neither is the primitive savage simple, for he conceives things not “as they are,” but through a veil of awe and mystery. Nor is the child simple, Messrs. and Mesdames Pedagogues; you may instruct it scientifically, tell it “plain truths” and facts, but the not-yet-educated young mind will distrust you and will continue to live in its illusionary, fantastic world. Not even beasts may be accused of that vice: recall Maeterlinck’s subtle dogs and horses.
Nothing is simple, although civilization has attempted to simplify a good deal. We have come to live in accordance with established standards, customs, regulations; inertia and routine have replaced impulse and initiative. Science has endeavored to explain away man’s dreams, to do away with religion, soul, imagination, to prove away our mysteries and wonders. Known stuff. Thus has come to be the matter-of-fact multitude, the simple, the all-knowing, those who act and think and feel “as everybody else does,” as they are taught and trained by the ingenious apparatus of scientific, moral, and social classifications, definitions, simplifications, in a word—the civilized man.
Yet side by side with civilization, machinization, automatonization, there is another powerful force moving the world: culture. Culture versus civilization, this is how I gauge the issue. Do not ask me to define these words: let Professor Herrick do it. We are all civilized, of course; especially the Germans: witness their recent astounding achievements. Now try to apply the term “culture” to the activities of those Kulturtraeger in Belgium and before Rheims—Q. E. D. Michael Bakounin “tried” it in 1848, when he suggested to his fellow-revolutionists in Dresden that they place on the besieged walls Raphael’s Madonna in order to avert the canon of the cultured Prussians; luckily the Saxons knew better their cousins, “the blond beasts.” Pardon this paroxysm of my old disease, Prussophobia. Bakounin, you see, belonged to the few, to the non-simple, to those who had an insight beyond the apparent, the fact, to the hectic, to the abnormal, if you please; “abnormal” is the label given to such individualities by the many, the civilized.
I am not so vulgar as to affect megalomania, when asserting that I am cultured: this is an apologia, a confession of my sins before my critic, the advocate of simplicity. When facing a sunset, I do not simply see a display of colors, nor do I think of the simple explanation of this phenomenon as offered by science, but I live through a world of associations, recollections of diverse impressions and reactions imprinted on my mind by Boecklin, Mallarmé, Debussy—by all the gods that make up the religion of modern man. Life external, simple facts, are to me an artless raw libretto, which, naturally, cannot in itself satisfy one who has come into this world with the intention of enjoying grandiose opera. I call it culture, this faculty of seeing things creatively, not in monotones, not through window-panes, but through multiplying lenses which collect the rays of all suns and concentrate them on the focus. Now, pray, is there any hope for me “to learn how to be simple?”
Life is composed of hundreds of grey days interspersed with a few scintillating moments, the few moments justifying our otherwise superfluous existence. In this respect I am not a Croesus, but the half dozen or so of meteoric flashes that have pierced through the ordinariness of my life I treasure grudgingly, and would not exchange them for years of continuous well-being. Congratulate me: I have become enriched now with another moment of rare beatitude, of indelible radiance. I was present at the transubstantiation of Oscar Wilde, performed by John Cowper Powys.
Was it a lecture? “Most certainly,” would advise me my simple friend. What a dwarfish misnomer for the solemn rite that took place in the dark temple, the “catacomb” of the Little Theatre! I close my eyes, and see once more the galvanized demi-god vibrating in the green light, invoking the Uranian Oscar. We, the worshipers, sit entranced, hypnotized, demundanized, bewitched; the sorcerer makes us feel the presence in flesh and spirit of the Assyrian half-god, half-beast, who had the moral courage of living his life actively, to the full; we follow bewildered the quaint meteor of Wilde’s genius illuminating the world for a moment, dropping down into a hideous pit, reflaming in the pale glimmer of discovered sorrow; we finally hear the sonorous requiem to Oscar’s break-down from the shock of having discovered a heart in himself. The lights are on, the sorcerer is gone, but we remain under the spell of the hovering spirit.
To quote Powys is as impossible as to tell a symphony. It is the How and the What and the stage background that combine in creating the inexpressible charm of that experience. As to Oscar Wilde—well, what does it matter whether we agree with Mr. Powys’s interpretation or not? Wilde was my idol for a long time; I chanted dithyrambs to him and worshiped him fanatically. Later, in the perpetual process of dethroning gods, I observed the halo of the Prince of Paradoxes becoming paler in my eyes. Mr. Powys rekindled in my heart the sacred flame, for a moment at least, and gave me the rare sensation of reliving an old love.
À propos of simplicity: Wilde proclaimed artificiality as the great virtue, and certainly lived up to his theory. Compare his short but italicized life with the last weary years of Tolstoy that were an attempt for “simple life.” Need I tell you which I prefer?