Anarchism and Other Essays
fruit? It is like the last desperate struggle of fleeting life
against death.
Love needs no protection; it is its own protection. So long as love
begets life no child is deserted, or hungry, or famished for the want
of affection. I know this to be true. I know women who became
mothers in freedom by the men they loved. Few children in wedlock
enjoy the care, the protection, the devotion free motherhood is
capable of bestowing.
The defenders of authority dread the advent of a free motherhood,
lest it will rob them of their prey. Who would fight wars? Who
would create wealth? Who would make the policeman, the jailer, if
woman were to refuse the indiscriminate breeding of children? The
race, the race! shouts the king, the president, the capitalist, the
priest. The race must be preserved, though woman be degraded to a
mere machine,--and the marriage institution is our only safety valve
against the pernicious sex awakening of woman. But in vain these
frantic efforts to maintain a state of bondage. In vain, too, the
edicts of the Church, the mad attacks of rulers, in vain even the arm
of the law. Woman no longer wants to be a party to the production of
a race of sickly, feeble, decrepit, wretched human beings, who have
neither the strength nor moral courage to throw off the yoke of
poverty and slavery. Instead she desires fewer and better children,
begotten and reared in love and through free choice; not by
compulsion, as marriage imposes. Our pseudo-moralists have yet to
learn the deep sense of responsibility toward the child, that love in
freedom has awakened in the breast of woman. Rather would she forego
forever the glory of motherhood than bring forth life in an
atmosphere that breathes only destruction and death. And if she does
become a mother, it is to give to the child the deepest and best her
being can yield. To grow with the child is her motto; she knows that
in that manner alone can she help build true manhood and womanhood.
Ibsen must have had a vision of a free mother, when, with a master
stroke, he portrayed Mrs. Alving. She was the ideal mother because
she had outgrown marriage and all its horrors, because she had broken
her chains, and set her spirit free to soar until it returned a
personality, regenerated and strong. Alas, it was too late to rescue
her life's joy, her Oswald; but not too late to realize that love in
freedom is the only condition of a beautiful life. Those who, like
Mrs. Alving, have paid with blood and tears for their spiritual
awakening, repudiate marriage as an imposition, a shallow, empty
mockery. They know, whether love last but one brief span of time or
for eternity, it is the only creative, inspiring, elevating basis for
a new race, a new world.
In our present pygmy state love is indeed a stranger to most people.
Misunderstood and shunned, it rarely takes root; or if it does, it
soon withers and dies. Its delicate fiber can not endure the stress
and strain of the daily grind. Its soul is too complex to adjust
itself to the slimy woof of our social fabric. It weeps and moans
and suffers with those who have need of it, yet lack the capacity to
rise to love's summit.
Some day, some day men and women will rise, they will reach the
mountain peak, they will meet big and strong and free, ready to
receive, to partake, and to bask in the golden rays of love. What
fancy, what imagination, what poetic genius can foresee even
approximately the potentialities of such a force in the life of men
and women. If the world is ever to give birth to true companionship
and oneness, not marriage, but love will be the parent.
THE MODERN DRAMA: A POWERFUL DISSEMINATOR OF RADICAL THOUGHT
So long as discontent and unrest make themselves but dumbly felt
within a limited social class, the powers of reaction may often
succeed in suppressing such manifestations. But when the dumb unrest
grows into conscious expression and becomes almost universal, it
necessarily affects all phases of human thought and action, and seeks
its individual and social expression in the gradual transvaluation of
existing values.
An adequate appreciation of the tremendous spread of the modern,
conscious social unrest cannot be gained from merely propagandistic
literature. Rather must we become conversant with the larger phases
of human expression manifest in art, literature, and, above all, the
modern drama--the strongest and most far-reaching interpreter of our
deep-felt dissatisfaction.
What a tremendous factor for the awakening of conscious discontent
are the simple canvasses of a Millet! The figures of his
peasants--what terrific indictment against our social wrongs; wrongs
that condemn the Man With the Hoe to hopeless drudgery, himself
excluded from Nature's bounty.
The vision of a Meunier conceives the growing solidarity and defiance
of labor in the group of miners carrying their maimed brother to
safety. His genius thus powerfully portrays the interrelation of the
seething unrest among those slaving in the bowels of the earth, and
the spiritual revolt that seeks artistic expression.
No less important is the factor for rebellious awakening in modern
literature--Turgeniev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Andreiev, Gorki,
Whitman, Emerson, and scores of others embodying the spirit of
universal ferment and the longing for social change.
Still more far-reaching is the modern drama, as the leaven of radical
thought and the disseminator of new values.
It might seem an exaggeration to ascribe to the modern drama such an
important role. But a study of the development of modern ideas in
most countries will prove that the drama has succeeded in driving
home great social truths, truths generally ignored when presented in
other forms. No doubt there are exceptions, as Russia and France.
Russia, with its terrible political pressure, has made people think
and has awakened their social sympathies, because of the tremendous
contrast which exists between the intellectual life of the people and
the despotic regime that is trying to crush that life. Yet while the
great dramatic works of Tolstoy, Tchechov, Gorki, and Andreiev
closely mirror the life and the struggle, the hopes and aspirations
of the Russian people, they did not influence radical thought to the
extent the drama has done in other countries.
Who can deny, however, the tremendous influence exerted by THE POWER
OF DARKNESS or NIGHT LODGING. Tolstoy, the real, true Christian, is
yet the greatest enemy of organized Christianity. With a master hand
he portrays the destructive effects upon the human mind of the power
of darkness, the superstitions of the Christian Church.
What other medium could express, with such dramatic force, the
responsibility of the Church for crimes committed by its deluded
victims; what other medium could, in consequence, rouse the
indignation of man's conscience?
Similarly direct and powerful is the indictment contained in Gorki's
NIGHT LODGING. The social pariahs, forced into poverty and crime,
yet desperately clutch at the last vestiges of hope and aspiration.
Lost existences these, blighted and crushed by cruel, unsocial
environment.
France, on the other hand, with her continuous struggle for liberty,
is indeed the cradle of radical thought; as such she, too, did not
need the drama as a means of awakening. And yet the works of
Brieux--as ROBE ROUGE, portraying the terrible corruption of the
judiciary--and Mirbeau's LES AFFAIRES SONT LES AFFAIRES--picturing
the destructive influence of wealth on the human soul--have
undoubtedly reached wider circles than most of the articles and books
which have been written in France on the social question.
In countries like Germany, Scandinavia, England, and even in
America--though in a lesser degree--the drama is the vehicle which is
really making history, disseminating radical thought in ranks not
otherwise to be reached.
Let us take Germany, for instance. For nearly a quarter of a century
men of brains, of ideas, and of the greatest integrity, made it their
life-work to spread the truth of human brotherhood, of justice, among
the oppressed and downtrodden. Socialism, that tremendous
revolutionary wave, was to the victims of a merciless and inhumane
system like water to the parched lips of the desert traveler. Alas!
The cultured people remained absolutely indifferent; to them that
revolutionary tide was but the murmur of dissatisfied, discontented
men, dangerous, illiterate troublemakers, whose proper place was
behind prison bars.
Self-satisfied as the "cultured" usually are, they could not
understand why one should fuss about the fact that thousands of
people were starving, though they contributed towards the wealth of
the world. Surrounded by beauty and luxury, they could not believe
that side by side with them lived human beings degraded to a position
lower than a beast's, shelterless and ragged, without hope or
ambition.
This condition of affairs was particularly pronounced in Germany
after the Franco-German war. Full to the bursting point with its
victory, Germany thrived on a sentimental, patriotic literature,
thereby poisoning the minds of the country's youth by the glory of
conquest and bloodshed.
Intellectual Germany had to take refuge in the literature of other
countries, in the works of Ibsen, Zola, Daudet, Maupassant, and
especially in the great works of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgeniev.
But as no country can long maintain a standard of culture without a
literature and drama related to its own soil, so Germany gradually
began to develop a drama reflecting the life and the struggles of its
own people.
Arno Holz, one of the youngest dramatists of that period, startled
the Philistines out of their ease and comfort with his FAMILIE
SELICKE. The play deals with society's refuse, men and women of the
alleys, whose only subsistence consists of what they can pick out of
the garbage barrels. A gruesome subject, is it not? And yet what
other method is there to break through the hard shell of the minds
and souls of people who have never known want, and who therefore
assume that all is well in the world?
Needless to say, the play aroused tremendous indignation. The truth
is bitter, and the people living on the Fifth Avenue of Berlin hated
to be confronted with the truth.
Not that FAMILIE SELICKE represented anything that had not been
written about for years without any seeming result. But the dramatic
genius of Holz, together with the powerful interpretation of the
play, necessarily made inroads into the widest circles, and forced
people to think about the terrible inequalities around them.
Sudermann's EHRE[1] and HEIMAT[2] deal with vital subjects. I have
already referred to the sentimental patriotism so completely turning
the head of the average German as to create a perverted conception of
honor. Duelling became an every-day affair, costing innumerable
lives. A great cry was raised against the fad by a number of leading
writers. But nothing acted as such a clarifier and exposer of that
national disease as the EHRE.
Not that the play merely deals with duelling; it analyzes the real
meaning of honor, proving that it is not a fixed, inborn feeling, but
that it varies with every people and every epoch, depending
particularly on one's economic and social station in life. We
realize from this play that the man in the brownstone mansion will
necessarily define honor differently from his victims.
The family Heinecke enjoys the charity of the millionaire Muhling,
being permitted to occupy a dilapidated shanty on his premises in the
absence of their son, Robert. The latter, as Muhling's
representative, is making a vast fortune for his employer in India.