There has been a good deal of misapprehension concerning Brandes’ attitude towards the war. His refusal to answer the interpellation of his friend Clemenceau, his condemnation of the Russian policy in Finland and of the cowardly and treacherous treatment of the Jews by the Poles, have given cause for suspecting him of pro-German sentiments. In a recent interview with the correspondent of the Paris Journal the Danish critic avows his full sympathy for France. Although his statement is reserved and plausibly neutral, one easily discerns his dislike for Germany, in whose Deutschland über Alles motto he sees a Jesuitic excuse for all means that may lead to her end. “German brutality is not instinctive; it is a scientific one, a theory.” The cause of the war he epitomizes in the mot of Pascal: “Pourquoi voulez vous tuer cette homme?”—“Il est mon ennemi: il habite de l’autre côté du fleuve.” Brandes expresses himself more frankly in the Danish Tilskueren, where he interprets the war as the struggle between liberalism and personal government, between civil spirit and militarism, between a people (England) which accords others commercial freedom and self-government and a country overridden with economic protectionism, junkers, and bureaucracy. “England has an independent press and a government which voices the parliament and public opinion; in Germany the press is semi-official, the government is responsible solely before the Kaiser, and the Kaiser only before God.”
Germanophobia ad Absurdum
The French Immortals, too old for actual participation in the war, have found an outlet for their patriotism in shedding red ink of ridiculous chauvinism. It has become a matter of course to meet a name of some “Membre de l’Academie” signed under such outbursts as this: “Nothing of the Barbarians, nothing of their literature, of their music, of their art, of their science, nothing of their culture, of anything Made in Germany!” Another Academic gives vent to his ire against those Frenchmen who still find certain German things worth admiring, and he vehemently advocates the prohibition of the Barbarian music and art “by law, by persuasion, by force, by violence if necessary!” The octogenarian Saint-Saens has written a series of articles venomously attacking Wagnerian music, labeling traitor any Frenchman who favors the art of the arch-foe of his country. Even the semi-official Le Temps was shocked by the violent tone of the old composer; it quoted Saint-Saens’s articles of the year 1876, in which the author appeared to be an ardent Wagnerite and appealed to his compatriots for broad-mindedness and toleration for “the greatest genius of our times.” As a substitute for the atrocious Wagner Saint-Saens recommends the return to Haydn and Mozart, even to Meyerbeer; Schumann’s Lieder he would ban for Gounod and Massenet; he favors even Dussek, for he is “only a Bohemian.” Patriotic as he is, he refuses to sanction the modern French composers, since Debussy, Fauré, D’Indy, and the rest are Wagnerians in his estimation. It is a case of “senile reactionarism,” as the Mercure de France rightly observes.
Comparative Morale
It is very interesting to compare the barometer of public morale in the European capitals, judging from their amusements. Here is one day’s bill taken from the London Daily News, the Petrograd Ryech, the Berliner Tageblatt, the Vienna Neue Freie Presse, and the Paris Figaro; I have omitted the movies, which bear for the most part ultra-patriotic titles, and the vaudevilles. The London bill is quite poor: Veronique, a comic opera; Mme. Sans-Gene; Gaby Deslys in Rosy Rapture, presented by Charles Frohman; The Girl in the Taxi; Frondai’s The Right to Kill; For England, Home, and Beauty; and our old friends, the Irish Players, in the Little Theatre. Still more meager is the Paris bill: outside of Cavalleria Rusticana (the chairman of the Walt Whitman dinner pronounces it Keyveleeria Rohstikeyna), it abounds with such tit-bits as La Petite Fonctionaire, Mam’zelle Boy Scout, Mariage de Pepeta, and so forth. Berlin has on that day three operas—Don Juan, Elektra, Lohengrin; three dramas—Faust, Peer Gynt, Schluck und Jau (the last one in Rheinhard’s Deutsches Theater), not counting the minor affairs. Vienna’s bill took away my breath: a Schönberg-Mahler Abend, a Schubert-Strauss Abend, a Beethoven-Brahms Abend, a Brahms Kammermusik Abend, a concert under Sevcik; Carmen; a play by Fulda after Molière; Ibsen’s Master Builder and Ghosts; Kleist’s Kätchen von Heilbronn. As for the Petrograd bill, I had better not say what emotions it has aroused in me. Judge for yourselves: five operas—Traviata, Faust, Pagliacci, Ruslan and Ludmilla, Eugene Onegin; a ballet by Mlle. Krzesinsky; two ballets by Fokin’s company; plays by Ibsen, Mirbo, Andreyev, beside Potash and Perlmutter and other importations; an exhibition of paintings by Lancerè and Dobuzhinsky; a Poeso-Evening by Futurist poets with Igor Severyanin as leader; an Evening of Poetry under K. R. (Grand Duke Konstantine, whose play King of the Jews recently appeared in an English translation); public lectures on The Blue Bird in Our Days, on Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.... Allow me to stop. Are you inclined to draw conclusions and comparisons between the stage of war-ridden Europe and that of peacefully complacent America? I beg to be excused.
Edmond Rostand on the Lusitania
Rostand is a member of the Academy; perhaps this affliction is responsible for his growing hoarseness as a Chantecler. Yet as of all recent war poems his is the best, I feel justified in citing it:
Les Condoléances
Bernstorff, pour aller à la Maison Blanche,
S’est mis tout en noir.