And by the same token, why not a Falk, Mr. Philistine, since we are agreed that this is a drama of consciousness. Of what use is the average man in this extremity? The artist is the Homo Sapiens par excellence, for it is in him that consciousness has reached its most complex differentiation. “I am,” says Falk, “what they call a highly differentiated individual. I have, combined in me, everything—design, ambition, sincerity of knowledge and ignorance, falsehood and truth. A thousand heavens, a thousand worlds are in me.” And recognizing this fact he wrestles with it through some four hundred odd pages. That Falk loved two women, or ten women, is not only possible, but probably inevitable. What in the average man is a temperate reaching out for a few specific joys becomes in a Falk the impulse of his whole being for self-expression. It bursts out along a thousand channels, requiring as many outward aspects as there are sources in his personality. And it is this devious stream of a human consciousness that we are following outward to its expression in words or acts, and backward to its source, as we dissect with Przybyszewski Falk’s mental protoplasm.
“Futile,” sneers the Philistine, “utterly futile. If that is a Homo Sapiens, give me a subman. Your Falk knew no happiness and he gave none. He only strewed suffering in his wake both for himself and others. He was without scruples and without conscience. Where did he get to with all his differentiation? He wrote a few books, to be sure, but what were they in the scale of the women he ruined, the men he did to death? Even of his own misery? His gift of introspection was a sharp knife turned against himself, since he cried out in the end: ‘to be chemically purified of all thoughts.’ Homo Sapiens indeed!”
You can see Przybyszewski wearily twisting the scalpel in his nerveless hands, you can see the smile that twists his lips just before they curve about the waiting cognac glass. “No, he was not happy, it is true he did strew misery in his wake. He was neurasthenic and degenerate and criminal. He was all these things and all the other things which you have forgotten or never perceived. For he was Homo Sapiens. And such as he is I have drawn him. Ha, ha—Vive l’Humanité!”
[1] Homo Sapiens, by Stanislaw Przybyszewski. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
The Spring Recital
Theodore Dreiser
SCENE:
A prosperous First Church in the heart of a great city. Outside the city’s principle avenue, along which busses and vehicles of all descriptions are rolling. Surrounding the church a graveyard, heavily shaded with trees, the branches of which reach to the open windows bearing soft odours. Over the graves many full blown blossoms, and in the sky a full May moon. An idling sense of spring in the gait and gestures of the pedestrians. In front of the church hangs a small lighted cross, and under it swings the sign “Organ Recital, 8:30, Wilmuth Tabor, Organist.” The doors giving into the church are open. The interior, save for the presence of a caretaker in a chair, is empty. On either side of the pulpit, below a great dark rose window, burns a partially lighted electrolier. In the organ loft, over the street doors, a single light.
First Street Boy (to his companion, ambling to discover what the world contains, and glancing in as they pass). Gee! Who’d wanta go to church on a night like this?