Scarlet—White
(Struck at the double standard)
The woman who is scarlet now
Was soul of whiteness yesterday;
A void is she wherein a man
May leave his lust to-day.
’Twas with the kiss Ischariot
A traitor bore her heart away;
Her body now is leased by men
That kneel at church to pray.
Three Apples
I who am Giver of Life
Out of the cradle of dawn
Bring you this infant of song.—
He has a golden tongue
And wings upon his feet.
The apple of silver he holds
Once lay at the breast of the moon;
I give him an apple of gold
’Twas forged in the fires of the sun;
This apple of copper I give
That Sunset concealed in her hair.
When from the husk of dusk I shake the stars,
Down slumber’s vine I’ll send him dreams in dew,
And peace will overtake him like a song
Like thoughts of love invade a lover’s mind.
The spear-scars of the red world he will wear
As women in their hair may wear a rose.
On the rosary of his days
He will say a prayer for your sake,
The hounds-o’-wonder will lie at his side,
And lick the dust-o’-the-world from his feet.
The apple of silver will work him a charm
When under his pillow he lays it at night;
The apple of copper will warm his heart
When a heart he loves grows cold on his own;
The apple of gold will teach him a song
For children to sing when he blows on a reed;
The dew will hear and run to the sun,
The sun will whisper it in my ear,
And you, being dead, the song will hear.
Zarathustra Vs. Rheims
George Soule
Hauptmann and Rolland have quarreled about the war, Hæckel has repudiated his English honorary degrees, and now Thomas Hardy has placed on Nietzsche the responsibility for the destruction of the cathedral of Rheims. The tragedy of nationalism, it seems, is not content with ruining lives and art; it must also vitiate philosophy and culture.
“Nietzsche and his followers, Treitschke, Von Bernhardi, and others,” writes Hardy. In the next sentence he speaks of “off-hand assumptions.” One is tempted to write, “Christ and his followers, Czar Nicholas, Kaiser Wilhelm, and others!”
Nietzsche has been claimed as a prophet by hereditary aristocrats, by anarchists, by socialists, by artists, and by militarists. There is even a book to prove that he who called himself “the Antichrist” was a supporter of the Catholic Church. One suspects, however, that the Jesuit who wrote it had a subtle sense of truth.
The most fundamental truth about Nietzsche is that the torrent of his inspiration is open to everyone who can drink of it. His value, his quality, consist not in the fact that he said this or that, but that life in him was strong and beautiful. This is true of all prophets; how much more so, then, of the one who threw to the winds all stiffness of orthodoxy and insisted on a transvaluation of all values! “O my soul, to thy domain gave I all wisdom to drink, all new wines, and also all immemorially old strong wines of wisdom,” said Zarathustra.
But even in his teachings we can find no justification of the present shame of Europe. It was Darwin who laid the foundation for the philosophy of the survival of the fittest and the struggle for existence. With the shallow inferences from these conceptions Nietzsche had no patience. If the fittest survives, the fittest is not necessarily the best. The brute force which makes for survival had no attraction for Nietzsche. He called upon man’s will to make itself the deciding factor in the struggle. When he argued for strength, he argued for the strength of the beautiful and noble, not strength for its own sake. Of what avail is a great individual to the world if he makes himself weak and sacrifices himself to an inferior enemy? The French gunners who defended the Cathedral of Rheims might justly claim the approval of Nietzsche. If the Allies had turned the other cheek and allowed their countries to be overrun by German militarism, they would then have proved themselves Christian and truly anti-Nietzschean.
Moreover, Nietzsche uncompromisingly opposed the supremacy of mere numbers, the supremacy of non-spiritual values. He argued after the war of 1870 that the victory of Prussian arms endangered rather than helped Prussian culture. Culture is a thing of the spirit; it was undermined by the tide of smug satisfaction in the triumph of militarism.
“You say that a good cause will even justify war; I tell you that it is the good war that justifies all causes,” wrote Nietzsche. It is the logic of the newspaper paragrapher which makes this statement a justification of militarism. The good war—what is that? It is the quality of heroism, the unreckoning love of beauty, the pride of the soul in its own strength and purity. It is the opponent of mere contentment and sluggishness. It is the militant virtue which has inspired great souls since the beginning of the world; it is the hope of future man. If a cause is not justified by the good war what can be said for it? It is a pathetic absurdity to think that Nietzsche would have found the good war in the present struggle for territory and commercial supremacy. No, gentlemen of letters, fight the Kaiser if you must, but do not aim your clods at the prophets in your hasty partisanship!
For it is in this very Nietzsche and his good war that mankind will now find its spirit of hope. We who see that wars of gunpowder are evil, we who intend to abolish them, cannot do so by denying our own strength and appealing helplessly to some external power in the sky. We must say with Zarathustra,
“How could I endure to be a man, if man were not also the composer, the riddle-reader, and the redeemer of chance!
“To redeem what is past, and to transform every ‘It was’ into ‘Thus would I have it!’ that only do I call redemption!
“Will—so is the emancipator and joy-bringer called: thus have I taught you, my friends!”
In Ecce Homo the word “German” has become something like his worst term of abuse. He believes only in French culture; all other culture is a misunderstanding. In his deepest instincts Nietzsche asserts to be so foreign to everything German, that the mere presence of a German “retards his digestion.” German intellect is to him indigestion. If he has been so enthusiastic in his devotion to Wagner, this was because in Wagner he honored the foreigner, because in him he saw the incarnate protest against all German virtues, the “counter-poison” (he believed in Wagner’s Jewish descent). He allows the Germans no honor as philosophers: Leibnitz and Kant were “the two greatest clogs upon the intellectual integrity of Europe.” No less passionately does he deny to the Germans all honor as musicians: “A German cannot know what music is. The men who pass as German musicians are foreigners, Slavs, Croats, Italians, Dutchmen, or Jews.” He abhors the “licentiousness” of the Germans in historical matters: “History is actually written on Imperial German and Antisemitic lines, and Mr. Treitschke is not ashamed of himself.” The Germans have on their conscience every crime against culture committed in the last four centuries (they deprived the Renaissance of its meaning; they wrecked it by the Reformation). When, upon the bridge of two centuries of decadence, a force majeure of genius and will revealed itself, strong enough to weld Europe into political and economic unity, the Germans finally with their “Wars of Liberation,” robbed Europe of the meaning of Napoleon’s existence, a prodigy of meaning. Thus they have upon their conscience all that followed, nationalism, the névrose nationale from which Europe is suffering, and the perpetuation of the system of little states, of petty politics.—George Brandes in “Friedrich Nietzsche.”
The Cost of War
Clarence Darrow
Along with the many other regrets over the ravages of war is the sorrow for the destruction of property. As usual, those who have nothing to lose join in the general lamentation. There is enough to mourn about in the great European Holocaust without conjuring up imaginary woes. So far as the vast majority of people is concerned, the destruction of property is not an evil but a good.
The lands and houses, the goods and merchandise and money of the world are owned by a very few. All the rest in some way serve that few for so much as the law of life and trade permit them to exact. At the best, this is but a small share of the whole. All the property destroyed by war belongs to the owners of the earth; it is for them that wars are fought, and it is they who pay the bills. When the war is over, the property must be re-created. This, the working men will do. In this re-building, they will work for wages. Then, as now, the rate of wages will be fixed by the law of demand and supply—the demand and supply of those who toil. The war will create more work and less workmen. Therefore labor can and will get a greater share of its production than it could command if there was less work and more workmen. The wages must be paid from the land and money and other property left when the war is done. This will still be in the hands of the few, and these few will be compelled to give up a greater share. The destruction of property, together with its re-creation means only a re-distribution of wealth—a re-distribution in which the poor get a greater share. It is one way to bring about something like equality of property—a cruel, wasteful, and imperfect way, but still a way. That the equality will not last does not matter, for in the period of re-construction the workman will get a larger share and will live a larger life.
As the war goes on, the funds for paying bills will be met in the old way by selling bonds. These too will be paid by the owners of the earth. True, the property from which the payment comes must be produced by toil, but if the bonds that must be paid from the fruits of labor had never been issued this surplus would not have gone to labor, but would have been absorbed by capital. This is true for the simple reason that the return to labor is not fixed by the amount of production, the rate of taxation, the price of interest and rents, but by the supply and demand of labor, and nothing else.
If labor shall sometime be wise enough, or rather instinctive enough to claim all that it produces, it will at the same time have the instinct or wisdom to leave the rulers’ bonds unpaid.
But all of this is far, far away; in determining immediate effects we must consider what is, not what should be. And the jobless and propertyless can only look upon the destruction of property as giving them more work and a larger share of the product of their labor. Chicago was never so prosperous, or wages so high, as when her people were re-building it from the ashes of a general conflagration. San Francisco found the same distribution of property amongst its workmen after the earthquake and the fire had laid it waste, and her people were called upon to build it up anew.
Carlyle records that during the long days of destruction in the French Revolution the people were more prosperous and happy than they had ever been before. True, the Guilotin was doing its deadly work day after day, but its victims were very few. The people got used to the guilotin, and heeded it no more than does the crowd heed a hanging in our county jail, when they gayly pass in their machines.
After the first shock was over, during the four years of our Civil War, wages were higher, men were better employed, production greater, and distribution more equal than it had been at any time excepting in the extreme youth of the Republic. Then land was free.
Then again, this world has little to destroy. After centuries of so-called civilization, the human race has not accumulated enough to last a year should all stop work. The world lives, and always has lived, from hand to mouth. This is not because of any trouble in producing wealth, but because things are made not to use, but to sell. And the wages of the great mass of men does not permit them to buy or own more than they consume from day to day.
It is for this reason that half the people do not really work; that the market for labor is fitful and uncertain, and never great enough; and that all are poor. After a devastation like a great war, the need of re-creating will turn the idle and the shirkers into workmen, because the rewards will be greater. This will easily and rapidly produce more than ever before. From this activity, invention will contrive new machines to compete with men, going once more around the same old circle, until the world finds out that machines should be used to satisfy human wants and not to build up profits for the favored few.
One may often regret the impulses that bring destruction of property, but before any one mourns over the destruction of property, purely because of its destruction, he should ask whose property it is.
Wedded:
A Social Comedy
Lawrence Langner