Pumpernickel Philosophy
The Man of Genius, by Herman Tuerck. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]
Professor Tuerck, a very normal German, has been writing critical essays since the end of the eighties, and he has not changed a bit—the same good old idealist of the sissy category. In this book he makes a study of Genius, and comes to the magnificent conclusion that the chief characteristics of a genius must be goodliness, loving kindness, respect, and loyalty to existing institutions, obedience to the law, objectivity, and truth. Naturally, those who do not possess these delicacies are villains. The professor demonstrates two groups of thinkers, one in angelic white, the other in devilish black. Among the first, the real geniuses, we find beside Christ, Buddha, Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, also Alexander, Cæsar, and Napoleon. But oh, Mr. Wilson, what German atrocities! Mr. Tuerck mercilessly disfigures his victims and pastes upon them with his saliva accurate, uniform labels. In Hamlet, in Faust, in Manfred, in the mentioned law-givers and warriors, the author manages to discover goody-goody traits of exemplary burghers. In the Black Gallery we face the lugubrious sinners—Stirner, Nietzsche, and Ibsen. “Woe to him who follows these modern antisophers!” cries Mr. Tuerck, for they are enemies of humanity, of the state, of society, of reality, of truth, for they are selfish and subjective. “The Devil, the Father of Lies, is great and Friedrich Nietzsche is his prophet.”
A word of reassurance for Mr. Thomas Hardy. This Sauerkraut-gem, The Man of Genius, has had seven editions in Germany, and has aroused wide enthusiasm there, as witnessed by the numerous press-notices exaltingly praising the great idealist Tuerck, written by professors, Geheimraths, Hofraths, catholics, protestants, and even by socialists! Now, pray, ought there be any fear for the Nietzscheanization of the Fatherland?
K.
Kilmer’s Confession
Trees, and Other Poems, by Joyce Kilmer. [George H. Doran Company, New York.]
Mr. Kilmer furnishes the following prose account of his convictions: “I am catholic in my tastes and Catholic in religion, am socially a democrat and politically a Democrat. I am a special writer on the staff of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Times Review of Books and the Literary Digest. I am bored by Feminism, Futurism, Free Love.” This is perhaps a more succinct expression of his facility of faith than can be found in his verse. Readers should thank him for it, because it renders unnecessary any further attempt to discover what he believes.
At the opening of the volume, Mr. Kilmer quotes the following stanza from Coventry Patmore:
Mine is no horse with wings, to gain
The region of the Spheral chime
He does but drag a rumbling wain,
Cheered by the coupled bells of rhyme.
This, too, is useful, because it frankly warns us against looking in his verse for anything which is not there.
Within his self-imposed limitations, Mr. Kilmer has done good work. The amusing couplets about Servant Girl and Grocer’s Boy have pleased countless newspaper readers, The Twelve-Forty-Five is a graphic description of the feeling produced by a late suburban train, To a Young Poet Who Killed Himself is an obvious rebuke to the small-hearted versifier, and Old Poets is a comfortable exposition of the philosophy of comfort. The religious poems will probably not be moving to anyone who does not share Mr. Kilmer’s creed.
Mr. Kilmer’s work is glossy with a simplicity more easy-going than profound. Though he is young himself, he obviously does not sympathize with young poets, of whom he writes:
There is no peace to be taken
With poets who are young,
For they worry about the wars to be fought
And the songs that must be sung.
His ideal is that of the “old poet”:—
But the old man knows that he’s in his chair
And that God’s on His throne in the sky.
So he sits by his fire in comfort
And he lets the world spin by.
G. S.
Hilarious Iconoclasm
Art, by Clive Bell. [Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.]
It is an exquisite pleasure to disagree with Clive Bell! Like a fierce Hun he whirls through the art galleries of Europe, and smashes all venerated masterpieces into a heap of rubbish, sparing but the Byzantine Primitives and some of the Post-Impressionists. Between these two epochs he sees a hideous gap; not more than one in a hundred of the works produced between 1450 and 1850 is he willing to accept as a work of art. It naturally hurts to witness the slaughter of your old friends, such as Michelangelo, Velasquez, Whistler; but our Attila performs his massacre so beautifully, with such a charming sense of humor, that you cannot help admiring the paradoxical feats. What but a good-humored smile will provoke in you such a prank, e. g.: “Nietzsche’s preposterous nonsense knocked the bottom out of nonsense more preposterous and far more vile”? The best part of it is the fact that the author does not attempt to convince you in anything, for neither is he convinced in the infallibility of his hypotheses. The book is a relucent gem among the recent dull and heavy works of art.