Nietzsche in Fiction
The Encounter, by Anne Douglas Sedgewick. [The Century Company, New York]
Nietzsche—jealous, dyspeptic, wonderful—lives in these pages so vividly that the illusion of biography is attained. His dreams, his faults, his fears stand forth. Light is focussed upon the great thinker. Ludwig Wehlitz, as he is called in the novel, loves a young and beautiful girl from America—Persis Fenamy. He is rivalled in his love by two other Germans, disciples of his, but very different personally. Persis, who is a combination of loveliness and good sense, proves to be a difficult, even impossible, problem for the three philosophers. Their wooing is the basis of the work.
Such a story achieves originality at one stroke; and it is fair to say that the author’s development of this dangerous theme is fully equal to her daring. She catches the high-lights upon the soul of this curious Titan; she constructs the man as he must actually have been, and places him in circumstances of her own arrangement. His imperative genius and his characteristic childishness work out consistently together. Pedants and long-winded scholars, who know not the poet in their god, will argue that the real Nietzsche neither could nor would have waxed passionate over a lovely woman ... the book is not for them. Anne Douglas Sedgewick sees deep and imagines clearly, and her findings are authentic. Her lesser people, notably Wehlitz’s untidy Italian friend, Eleanora, and the inscrutable Mrs. Fenamy, are created with the same splendid skill and vision. This writer’s realism is not the vaunted “crude and ruthless” variety; for, although it displays life in a plain and natural manner, there is in it an intense emotional quality which always evades the camera or the microscope. The Encounter is altogether worthy.
Herman Schuchert.
Joseph Campbell
Irishry, by Joseph Campbell. [Maunsel and Company, London]
Joseph Campbell holds an enviable position among the present-day Irish bards. His poems are big, vital themes, readable by every intelligent person. In his volume of lyrics—for he possesses to a remarkable degree the enchanted tongue—he takes you into every walk of life in Ireland. And what goes in regard to life and occupations in England and Ireland holds good in this country and elsewhere. He does not shun the pig-killer, the quarry-man, the mid-wife, the unfrocked, or disgraced priest, the blind man, the osier seller, or even the ragman. The characters are not put before you as repugnance personified; he makes you sympathize, admire, and even love them. You could call it a drama of characters; each one unfolded being a separate act.
How beautiful is The Shepherd. You can see the stars, and clearly comprehend the beauty of the simile in which he compares the shepherd to the man of Chaldea. The picture of the pasture of eld looms forth like a marvelous mosaic or mural painting:
THE SHEPHERD
Dark against the stars
He stands: the cloudy bars
Of nebulae, the constellations ring
His forehead like a king.
The ewes are in the fold:
His consciousness is old
As his, who in Chaldea long ago
Penned his flock, and brooded so.
The Shepherd can justly be compared to Sir Richard Lovelace’s To Lucretia on Going to War. They have in common the same metallic sweetness. A companion piece in both strength of beauty and lyrical qualities is The Mother:
The hearthstone broods in shadow,
And the dark hills are old,
But the child clings to the mother,
And the corn springs in the mould.
And makes the world anew:
The cuckoo’s cry in the meadow,
The moon, and the earthly dew.
In The Blind Man at the Fair there is a truly masterly imagining of the blind one’s agony.
O to be blind!
To know the darkness that I know.
The stir I hear is the empty wind,
The people idly come and go.
. . . . . . . . . .
Last night the moon of Lammas shined,
Rising high and setting low;
But light is nothing to the blind—
All, all is darkness where they go.
In The Laborer he reminds one of Whitman in lyrics. Here he speaks of the open roads, the blue hills, the tranquil skies, and the serene heavens. A beautiful passage from The Whelk-Gatherer reads:
Where the dim sea-line
Is a wheel unbroken;
Where day dawns on water,
And night falls on wind,
And the fluid elements
Quarrel forever.
What satire, profusely laden with bitter irony is contained in The Orangeman:
His faith, ’Sixteen-Ninety;
His love, none; his hope,
That hell may one day
Get the soul of the Pope.
. . . . . . . . . .
Lives in beauty, with Venus
And Psyche in white,
For his spirit’s delight.
Last, but not least, is The Old Woman:
As a white candle
In a holy place,
So is the beauty
Of an aged face.
As the spent radiance
Of the winter sun,
So is the woman
With her travail done.
Her brood gone from her,
And her thought as still
As the waters
Under the ruined mill.