The Major Symphony

George Soule

Round splendor of the harp’s entonéd gold

Throbbing beneath the pleading violins—

That hundred-choiring voice that wins and wins

To over-filling song; the bright and bold

Clamor of trumpets; ’cellos that enfold

Richly the flutes; and basses that like djinns

Thunder their clumsy threatening, as begins

The oboe’s mystic plaint of sorrows old:—

Are these the symphony? No, it is will

In passion striving to surmount the world,

Growing in sensuous dalliance, sudden whirled

To ecstasies of shivering joy, and still

Marching and mastering, singing mightily,

Consummate when the silence makes it free.

The Prophet of a New Culture

George Burman Foster

A profound unrest tortures the heart of the modern man. The world, slaughtering the innocents, is meaningless; life, bruised and bewildered, is worthless—such is the melancholy mood of modernity. Today life is a burden to many to whom it was once a joy. Decadents, they call themselves, who rediscover the elements of their most personal life in everything that is weary and ailing. We are all more or less infected with this weariness and ennui. The blows which the spirit experiences from opposing sides today are so powerful that no one is in a position to endure them with equanimity. The forces resident within the soul no longer suffice to give support and stability to life. Hence our culture has lost faith in itself. Our civilization is played out. What the Germans call Weltschmerz has come over us. Philosophers have fashioned it into systems; singers, into song—the sad but not sweet music of humanity; sufferers all, into a sharp cry for redemption. Deniers of the malady must have their eyes opened by physicians, scurrying around curatively in this humanity.

First of all, there are those who borrow their panacea from religion. They demand a reform of the ecclesiastical life according to the sense and spirit of primitive Christianity. They propose to recover the religion of Jesus, and to find in it healing for all the diseases of the times. But this remedy is so complicated that it reveals rather than heals the whole disunity and distraction of our present life. It was Tolstoi, in garb of desert prophet, who would restore original Christianity. He preached a radical reversal of our cultural life—a monastic asceticism, a warfare against all life’s impulses, on whose development our culture is founded. And ecclesiastical liberals would do virtually the same thing when they try to extract from the religion of Jesus a food that shall be palatable to modern taste, and then call their ragout, compounded according to their own recipe, “original” Christianity.

There are other voices, noisier and more numerous. These hold Christianity in all its forms to be the hereditary evil of humanity, and see the salvation of the world only in a purification of life from every Christian memory. Owing to the brisk international interchange of ideas today, Buddhism has awakened a momentary hope, as if from the religion of far-off India a purer spiritual atmosphere might be wafted to us, in which we could convalesce from the Christian malady.

Now, what shall we say of all these strivings to heal the hurt of the modern mind?

All of them have one adverse thing in common: They would tear up an old tree by its roots, and put in its place another tree equally as old and equally as rotten. There is something reactionary in all of them. They want to cure the present by the past. It is precisely this that cannot be done. If Christianity was once original, spontaneous, creative, it is so no more. We cannot lead an age back to Jesus, which has grown out beyond him. And the Buddha-religion is no more youthful and life-giving than the Jesus-religion. It is indicative of the depth of the disgust and the extent of the confusion on the part of the man of today that such a hoary thing as Buddhism can make so great an impression upon him. A revived, renascent heathenism, even as compared with Christianity, would mean a reactionary and outlived form of life. That men of moral endeavor and scientific vision could hope for a substitute for Christianity, a conquest over Christianity, in a rebirth of paganism, is a new riddle of the Sphinx.

One way only remains out of the aberration and dividedness of our present life: not backward, but forward! No winning of a religious view of the world in any other way! No pursuit of the tasks of the moral life by those who seek a real part and place in the modern world, in any other way!

Hence, a man is coming to be leader—a man who, as no other, embodies in himself all the pain and all the pleasure, all the sickness and all the convalescence, all the age and all the youth, of our tumultuous and tortured times: Friedrich Nietzsche!

I do not know how many of you know the poet of Zarathustra. But if you do not know him, if you have never even heard his name, yet you do know him, for a part of him is in your own heart and hope. If you have ever thought seriously about yourself, if you have even tried to think seriously about yourself, you have taken up into yourself a part of Nietzsche as you have so thought. Even without your knowledge or intention, you have passed into the world of thought for which the name of Nietzsche stands. It has been only now and then, in quite significant turning points in human history, and only in the case of the rarest of men, that such an influence has gone forth as from this man. Once in the horizon of his power, and you are held there as by magic. And yet not in centuries has a name been so reviled and blasphemed as his. Anathematized from the pulpit, ridiculed from the stage, demolished by any champion of blatant and blind bourgeoisie, refuted regularly by pedants, he is still Friedrich Nietzsche, and, unlike most preachers, his congregation grows from year to year. Newspapers, always sensitive to the pulse-beat of mediocrity, tell us that “the man is dead”; that he belongs to the past; that he is already forgotten. But he is more alive, now that he is dead, than he was when he was living. Dead in the flesh, he is alive in the spirit, as is so often the case. Superficial misunderstandings, transient externals, regrettable excrescences—these were interred with his bones. The real and true Nietzsche lives, and has the keys of death and of hell. Who has the youth has the future—and this is why the future belongs to Nietzsche; for no contemporary so gathers the youth under his shining banner. And it is because the moral seething of our time, our struggle with questions of the moral life, are recapitulated and epitomized in Nietzsche, that he stands out, like an Alpine apocalypse, as the new prophet of our new day. The mysterious need of a man to find himself in another, another in himself, as deep calls unto deep or star shines unto star, is met in the resources of the great personality of Nietzsche.

The new day whose billows bear us afar began with doubt. First, a doubt of the Church and its divine authority. A violent, devastating storm swept over popular life. The storm was speedily exorcised. Again—

“The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.”

A new faith emerged from the old doubt, like sweet waters in a bitter sea, and kept man a living soul.

“The sea is calm tonight;

The tide is full.”

But the calm proves to be treacherous. The tide of the new faith now in the bible, and in the doctrine derived from the bible, went back to sea, and now I only hear

“Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating to the breath

Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.”

The human spirit urged a new, mightier protest against the “It is written,” which was said to put an end to all doubt. The new doubt, as free inquiry, as protestant science, flung down the gauntlet to the bible faith. No page of the sacred book remained untouched. Only one certainty sprang from this new doubt—the certainty that the sacred book was a human book. Therefore it had no right to rule over man. Man was its judge; it was not man’s judge. It must be measured by man’s truth, man’s conscience.

How, now, should the timorous heart of man be quieted in the presence of this new doubt? At once new props were offered him—truth and the state. What science recognized as “true,” what morals and bourgeoise customs and civil law sanctioned as “good”—these were now proffered man, that he might brace up his tottering life thereby. “Trust the light of science, and you shall indeed have the light of life; do what is ‘good,’ and you shall be crowned with the crown of life.” This was the watchword. Then there stirred in the womb of present-day humanity the last, ultimate, uncanniest doubt. If we doubt the Church, why not doubt the state, too? If we doubt faith, why not doubt science, too? If we doubt the bible, why not doubt reason, doubt knowledge, doubt morality? Even if what we call “true” be really true, can it make us happy? Can the men who have all the knowledge of our time at their disposal, can the scholars, can the cultivated, really become fit leaders of humanity through life’s little day? Is not that which is called “good” grievous impediment in our pilgrimage? Law, morals—are not these perhaps a blunder of history, an old hereditary woe with which humanity is weighted down?

This doubt—long and ominously maturing throughout the spiritual evolution of our new time—finds its most radical, most conscious, and most eloquent expression in Friedrich Nietzsche. He launches this doubt not only against all that has been believed and thought and done, but against all that men believe and think and do today. He shakes every position which men have held to be unshakable. An irresistible, diabolical curiosity impels him to transvalue all values with which men have reckoned, and to inquire whether they are values at all; whether “good” must not be called evil, “truth” error. As Nietzsche ventures upon this experiment of his curiosity, as he advances farther and farther with it, suddenly he laughs with an ironic, uproarious laughter. The experiment is a success! In the new illumination all the colors of life change. Light is dark, dark is light. What men had appraised as food, as medicine, evinced itself to be dangerous poison, miserably encompassing their doom. And since men believed that all the forces present, dying, poisoned culture, were resident in their “morals” and their “Christianity,” it was necessary to smash the tables of these old values. In full consciousness of his calling as destroyer of these old tables, Nietzsche called himself the immoralist, the anti-Christ. Morals and Christianity signified to him the most dangerous maladies with which men were suffering. He considered it to be his high calling as savior to heal men of these maladies. He sprang into the breach as anti-Christ. Like Voltaire, he was the apostle and genius of disrespect—respectability was the only disgrace, popularity the only perdition.

Nietzsche the Immoralist, Nietzsche the Antichrist! Dare we write his name and name his writings without calling down upon our much-pelted heads the wrath of the gods? Does he not blaspheme what is sacred, and must we not, then, give him a wide berth? There are the familiar words concerning false prophets in sheep’s clothing, but ravening wolves within. Such wolves there are—smooth, sleek men, paragons of “virtue,” and “morals,” and “faith,” but revolting enough in their inner rawness as soon as you get a glimpse of their true disposition. Conversely, might there not be men who come to us in wolves’ clothing, but whose hearts are tender and rich and intimate with a pure and noble humanity? We know such men. Friedrich Nietzsche was one of them. He was a true prophet. All his transvaluations dealt deadly blows at the old, false, man-poisoning prophetism. What if more morals matured in this immoralist, more Christianity in this anti-Christ, more divinity in this atheist, than in all the pronouncements of all those who today still are so swift to despise and damn what they do not understand?

Even Christianity, at its origin, in its young and heroic militancy, was not so amiable and harmless as we are wont to think. It, too, was born of the doubt of that whole old culture; of the most radical protest again status quo. It, too, leagued with all the revolutionary spirits of humanity. And it, too, revalued all the values of “faith” and “morals.” What if this new Nietzschean spirit of life’s universal reform, this creative, forward-striving genius of humanity, be once yet again embodiment and representative of life’s essential element of rejuvenescence and growth? What if true prophets are always men of Sturm und Drang, men of divine discontent, fellow-conspirators with the Future? Anti-Christs? These are they who blaspheme the holy spirit of humanity. Immoralists? These are they who say that life is good as it is, and therefore should stay as it “is” forever. Faith? This is directed, not to the past, but to the future; not to the certain, but to the uncertain. Faith is the venturesomeness of moral knighthood. Nietzsche was a Knight of the Future.

Why, then, should not a magazine of the Future interpret Nietzsche the prophet of a new culture? Man as the goal, beauty as the form, life as the law, eternity as the content of our new day—this is Nietzsche’s message to the modern man. In such an interpretation, Man and Superman should be the subject of the next article.

How a Little Girl Danced

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay

Being a Reminiscence of Certain Private Theatricals

(Dedicated to Lucy Bates)

Oh, cabaret dancer,

I know a dancer

Whose eyes have not looked

On the feasts that are vain.

I know a dancer,

Whose soul has no bond

With the beasts of the plain:

Judith the dancer,

With foot like the snow

And with step like the rain.

Oh, thrice-painted dancer,

Vaudeville dancer,

Sad in your spangles,

With soul all astrain:

I know a dancer,

Whose laughter and weeping

Are spiritual gain;

A pure-hearted, high-hearted

Maiden evangel

With strength the dark cynical

Earth to disdain.

Flowers of bright Broadway!

You of the chorus

Who sing in the hope

Of forgetting your pain:

I turn to a sister

Of sainted Cecelia,

A white bird escaping

The earth’s tangled skein!—

The music of God

In her innermost brooding!

The whispering angels

Her footsteps sustain!

Oh, proud Russian dancer:

Praise for your dancing!

No clean human passion

My rhyme would arraign.

You dance for Apollo

With noble devotion:

A high-cleansing revel

To make the heart sane.

But Judith the dancer

Prays to a spirit

More white than Apollo

And all of his train.

I know a dancer

Who finds the true God-head;

Who bends o’er a brazier

In Heaven’s clear plain.

I know a dancer,

Who lifts us toward peace

From this Earth that is vain:—

Judith the dancer,

With foot like the snow,

And with step like the rain.