A compassionate attitude toward Chicago was considerably relieved by the sight of the Auditorium-full which paid to hear Kreisler. Think of so many people being moved by such good taste! And, what was better still, they all behaved well. Kreisler deserved their tribute of attentive silence. Such violin playing hasn’t been heard in Chicago since the same artist was here last season. There is no describing Kreisler’s tone; a magic circle of stillness encloses it, which words have not learned to cross. In the memory it is a living beauty, penetrant and bewitching. Praise and appreciation are miserable things in the presence of this man’s music. Fritz Kreisler is a genius.
HERMAN SCHUCHERT.
Book Discussion
Ellen Key’s Steady Vision
The Younger Generation, by Ellen Key. [G. P. Putnam’s, New York.]
In the present amusing reign of boisterous propagandic voices, it is good to find a thinker who describes the exciting truth in simple terms. The many are able to catch glimpses of the truth; between glimpses, they shout and wave their inefficient arms for the enlightenment of their brothers, and for their own joy. The few see the truth steadily and, because they see steadily, become so passionately enthusiastic that they are driven to express themselves in quiet, mighty phrases. Such phrases imprint vital ideas upon the mind of the seeker, while pitiable confusion alone results from the shouts and wavings. In The Younger Generation, Ellen Key tells simply and surely her conclusions about vital things.
Conservative judgment is at once a splendid balance and a terrific barrier in the world of ideas. Intense enthusiasm, when it displays itself, often combines blindness with sight. It has always seemed to be asking too much to expect in one person a finely balanced enthusiasm in which the conservative element does not hamper the divine qualities of youth—courage, impetuosity, and an ever-fresh perception. Not to be extravagant, but to characterize her fairly, one may say that this Swedish woman writes as if she possessed the virtues commonly attributed to both age and youth. She is vigorous, free-hearted, and calm—enthusiastic, fiery, and sane—a champion of revolution when and wherever it breaks the path for evolution.
Reaching deftly into anarchism, christianity, feminism, individualism, socialism, and other good glimpses of the truth, she secures the elements for a strangely consistent wisdom.
Parents of the new generation will feel it to be a blasphemy against life—another name for God—that the beings their love has called into existence, the beings who bear the heritage of all past generations and the potentialities of all those to come, should be prematurely torn from the chain of development. Every such link that is wrenched away from unborn experiences, from unfinished work, was a beginning which might have had the most far-reaching effects within the race.... It is not death that the men of the new age are afraid of, but only premature and meaningless death.
“Women ought not to be content until governments have been deprived of the power of plunging nations into war.”—Ellen Key doesn’t ask the ladies to fidget and whimper at afternoon teas, nor to operate upon male-kind with their verbal lancets, nor to adopt circuitous resolutions about affairs of which they know nothing; but her suggestion, here as elsewhere, is simple and practical—so very simple that the ladies will smile down upon it as something delightfully girlish and unsophisticated. It is safe to speculate that not one of the smilers could, in her comfortable condescension, live up to this humble and powerful procedure:—“Women can always and everywhere ennoble the feelings, refine an idea of justice, and sharpen the judgment of those who come under their influence. The indirect result of this influence will then be that war will become more and more insufferable to the feelings, repugnant to the sense of justice, and absurd to the intelligence. When thus the eyes of the best among the nation are opened to the true nature of war, they will be finally opened also to the way to real, not armed, peace.” And as it is the secret and boasted and forgotten desire of every woman to influence a man, or men, these profoundly plain suggestions would seem to be sown in a fertile field. There is hope in this. Then she says, on another page: “To win over men’s brains to the idea of solidarity, that is the surest way of working for peace.” And this, being a more complex remark, will probably upset everything gained by the clarity of the preceding quotations; but it is given here to repay the time otherwise wasted by the many for whom simplicity has lost its god-like charm. Solidarity is a great idea, partly because it is something to be shouted about. But the first element in solidarity, human kindness, has never seemed “strong” to a shouting age.