Part 8
“Are you perhaps a messenger and announce that other tears are coming? I should like to know it; say, when will the great woe be ended?”
I should have asked more of the turbulent tear; but suddenly there began to flow more tears, tears without measure, and I at once understood that the river of tears is very deep.
In a mood of mingled longing and hate, he writes the Flowers of Autumn, whose splendor is only for the well-to-do—
Therefore I do not care if I see you dying now.
There is more virility, though nothing really purposeful in the Garden of the Dead, where the dead worker rises up to claim the flowers on the rich man’s grave:
Not only the flowers are mine, nay, even the boards of the coffin are mine!
And not only the boards of the coffin—you shrouds, you, too, are mine! He has it all through my work, my poor work—oh, all and all is mine!
Then the dead one passed away in the air with cries:
“You will pay for it yet! And he clenched his fist and threatened the world.”
The poet’s love for nature, the human longing of the worker imprisoned in the city for the country, which he has known but which is now beyond his reach, is expressed in the nightingale’s challenge to the laborer:
“Summer is here, summer is here! I shall not sing to you eternally, for finally my hour too will strike—a dark crow will occupy my branch, the holy song will cease. How long must I sing to you from the tree of the golden dream of freedom and love? Rise and let me not urge you any longer! The heaven will not remain eternally blue! Summer is here, summer is here! Now one can pass a merry time, for just like you who are fading at your machine, everything will in the end wither and be carried away.”
The Nightingale illustrates, as Professor Wiener points out, the poet’s command over poetic form as well as poetic thought. Even in the English prose translation we can feel the repetition of notes, the intricate weaving of melody in the bird’s song.
Another poem which is an example of the same power of combining matter and manner is that drama of the garment worker’s lift, The Sweatshop, which deserves to be quoted in full:
THE SWEAT SHOP
The machines in the shop roar so wildly that often I forget in the roar that I am; I am lost in the terrible tumult, my ego disappears, I am a machine. I work and work and work without end. I am busy and busy and busy at all time. For what and for when? I know not, I ask not! How should a machine ever come to think?
There are no feelings, no thoughts, no reason; the bitter bloody work kills the noblest, the most beautiful and best, the richest, the deepest, the highest, which life possesses. The seconds, minutes and hours fly; the nights like the days pass as swiftly as sails; I drive the machine just as if I wished to catch them; I chase without avail, I chase without end.
The clock in the workshop does not rest; it keeps on pointing and ticking and waking in succession. A man once told me the meaning of its pointing and waking—that there was a reason in it; as if through a dream I remember it all; the clock awakens life and sense in me, and something else—I forget what; ask me not, I know not, I know not, I am a machine!
And at times, when I hear the clock, I understand quite differently its pointing, its language; it seems to me as if the unrest[7] egged me on so that I should work more, more, much more. In its sound I hear only the angry words of the boss; in the two hands I see his gloomy look. The clock, I shudder—it seems to me it drives me and calls me machine, and cries out to me “sew”!
Only when the wild tumult subsides, and the master is away for the midday hour, day begins to dawn in my head, and a pain passes through my heart; I feel my wound, and bitter tears and boiling tears wet my meager meal, my bread; it chokes me, I can eat no more, I cannot! O, horrible toil! O, bitter necessity.
The shop at the midday hour appears to me like a bloody battlefield where all are at rest; about me I see lying the dead, and the blood that has been spilled cries from the earth. A minute later—the tocsin is sounded, the dead arise, the battle is renewed. The corpses fight for strangers, for strangers, and they battle and fall and disappear into night.
I look at the battlefield in bitter anger, in terror, with a feeling of revenge, with a hellish pain. The clock now I hear it aright. It is calling: “An end to slavery, an end shall it be”! It vivifies my reason, my feelings and shows how the hours fly; miserable I shall be as long as I am silent, lost, as long as I remain what I am.
The man that sleeps in me begins to waken—the slave that wakens in me is put to sleep. Now the right hour has come, an end to misery, an end let it be! But suddenly—the whistle, the boss, an alarm! I lose my reason, forget where I am; there is a tumult, the battle. Oh, my ego is lost! I know not, I care not, I am a machine!
The prose translation reproduces the thought alone; the Yiddish original reproduces also the loud insistent stitching of the machines, and the persistent nagging of the hateful clock. The machine beats out these lines:
Ich arbeit, un’ arbeit, un’ arbeit ohn’ Cheschben.
Es schafft sich, un schafft sich, un schafft sich ohn’ Zahl.[8]
To what he feels to be the hopeless tragedy of the worker is added in Rosenfeld’s verse the hopeless tragedy of the Jew—the wanderer who has lost the power to laugh. In Sephira[9] as well as in other poems, he brings out the fact that the Jew has set his Passover and the period of mourning following it, in the happiest time of the year. This poem, which has been really adequately translated into verse by Alice Stone Blackwell, is one of his saddest and most beautiful:
SEPHIRA
Methinks I fain would call upon my lyre To laugh a little, but in vain the call! For to begin with, ’tis Sephira now. Tell me, besides, can a Jew laugh at all.
Oh, God, you laugh? A wail is in the laugh! Brothers, what is there of reality In a Jew’s pleasures? Is his laughter real? ’Tis but the mingling of a sob and sigh.
No savor now has Jewish life, no grace Has Jewish Joy! Above, in heaven’s deep The silvery clouds are floating; and the woods Are full of life, but we sit down and weep.
Spicy the forest is, the garden green; How fresh and cool spring’s breezes blowing by! But what concern is that of yours, O Jew? ’Tis now Sephira; you are mute and sigh.
The lovely summer, comfort of men’s lives, Passes in sobbing and in sighs away. What hopes into the Hebrew can it give? To him what comfort summer or the May?
A mendicant who has no place to rest With whom all men make sport—each day, each week, each hour, Oh, is it meet for him to think of joys, Of gardens with their balm, of tree or flower?
And if the Jew at times break forth in song, Does his song seem to breathe of mirth to you? I, in his music hear but “Roam and Roam!” In every note I recognize the Jew.
If one who is well versed in music’s art Should chance to listen to a Jewish song, His eyes against his will would gush with tears, Each note would shake him with emotion strong.
The ram’s-horn call to penitence and grief, Oh, that is now the Hebrew’s favorite strain— A strain that makes but feelings for the tomb, A strain to break a heart of steel with pain.
The song of the Atonement, and the Dirge For the great temple and the Suppliant’s Psalm; These are his sweetest music, since his joy Was shattered in his holy land of balm.
Since his foe broke the sweetest instruments Of music in his Temple, ever dear, Only the plaintive ram’s-horn to the Jew Is left, on which he sobs but once a year.
Of drums and cymbals, organs, harps and lyres, Flutes and guitars, all with their dulcet strains, The gloomy ram’s-horn, withered, sad and dry, Is all that now to the poor Jew remains.
Whate’er he sing, however he may laugh However gay he seeks to make the strain, There suddenly awakens in his song The suppliant’s psalm that rends the heart with pain.
Me thinks I fain would call upon my lyre To laugh a little, but in vain the call! For to begin with, ’tis Sephira now, Tell me, besides, can a Jew laugh at all?
For the Rosenfeld of the Songs from the Ghetto, the present is terrible and the future hopeless; there is always an aching desire for beauty and happiness, but to him beauty and happiness themselves wait upon toil and suffering and death—the nightingale groans “upon the great cemetery of the world.”
But Songs from the Ghetto was written some fifteen years ago. Some of his later poetry is lighter—some hope and the joy of living appear to have crept into it. Of these, a hitherto unpublished poem in English called “If,” has but a gentle melancholy:
IF
If hope would fly and sorrow stay, If stars were dark and days were gray, If love would vanish like a breath, What would be life? What would be death?
If songs would die out in the nests, And pleasure to the human breasts, If flowers were to lose their hue,— Oh! What would be I, What would be you?
Stealings is full of personal joy:
STEALINGS
I steal a smile from thy fair face And hide it deep within my heart;
I steal a shadow of thy grace And hide it deep within my soul;
I steal a ray from thy bright eyes And hide it deep within my mind;
I steal the echo of thy sighs And weave them softly in my dreams; A word from thy sweet lips I steal And hide it deep within my thoughts;
I steal the rapture of thy thrill And drown it deep within my blood;
And from these thefts, these sacred stealings Are born the bright flames of my love,
And the fountain of all sweet feelings, And the stream of my life’s joy.
But even if he can for a time forget the toil and trouble of the world in a personal joy, his first love is with the workers and with them he asks to have his Resting Place—
Seek me not ’mid blooming meadows, Not there my spirit you can trace, Where workers toil like spectral shadows, ’Tis there you’ll find my resting place.
Seek me not where birds are singing, Not there my spirit you can trace; A slave am I—where chains are ringing, ’Tis there you’ll find my resting place.
Seek me not ’mid fountains dashing, Not there my spirit you can trace, Where tears are falling, teeth are gnashing, ’Tis there you’ll find my resting place.
And lov’st thou me with love’s true passion, Thy steps unto my spirit trace, Bring joy with thee; in love’s true fashion, Make sweet to me my resting place.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
NEW BOTTLES FOR NEW WINE
THE WORK OF ABASTENIA ST. LEGER EBERLE
CHRISTINA MERRIMAN
The recent International Exhibition of Art in New York was, from one angle, at least, a protest against certain set standards of art generally accepted today as inevitably right because they have “always been.” Some of the by-products of that stimulating movement toward freedom have been variously characterized as “courageous” “self-expressive” and “insolent.” Certainly much of it was a serious effort toward individual expression—a revolt against academic rules—partaking in some instances of a defiance which was a law unto itself, a frank disregard of what impression the mystified public carried away.
Such, however, was not the attitude or feeling of at least one exhibitor whose work aroused much interest and comment, and who was one of the first artists of standing to reflect in her work the spirit of awakened social consciousness so apparent today. Abastenia St. Leger Eberle showed two groups, the more striking of which was The White Slave, reproduced on the cover of this issue of THE SURVEY. They are the work of a sculptor who has strongly defined views as to the part the artist should play in the common life.
“The artist should be _the_ ‘socialist,’” says Miss Eberle. “He has no right to work as an individualist without responsibility to others. He is the specialized eye of society, just as the artisan is the hand, and the thinker the brain. More than almost any other one sort of work is art dependent on society for inspiration, material, life itself; and in that same measure does it owe society a debt. The artist must see for the people—reveal them to themselves and to each other.”
This is a far cry from “art for art’s sake.” That it is the viewpoint of an artist of high standing is attested by the early and generous recognition accorded Miss Eberle’s work from conservative and radical alike.
Most of her training was received from George Gray Barnard, with whom she studied for three years. In 1904, she was awarded a bronze medal at the St. Louis Exposition; the Girl on Roller Skate was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum in 1907; the Windy Doorstep was awarded the Helen Foster Barnett prize at the exhibit of the New York Academy in 1910; her figure of the veiled Salome was bought by an Italian Art Society in Venice; and she is one of the ten women who belong to the National Sculpture Society.
Miss Eberle is best known, perhaps, for her dancing figures, and her depiction of the everyday picturesque life on the lower East Side in New York, where she lived for years. Her people live for us, and speak for themselves,—from the placid, necessitous hunt of the Rag Picker to the tremulous wistfulness of the loving Little Mother; from the tender feeling of The Bath Hour to the intense, joyous absorption of the Rag-time dancer and the exultant balance of that flying little figure on the Roller Skate—and please notice that, characteristically, there is only one—borrowed, no doubt for a precious three-minute “coast.”
[Illustration:
THE WINDY DOORSTEP ]
The qualities which art critics first look for—the sure touch and line of her modelling, the line composition and massing—are especially apparent in The Windy Doorstep, in which Miss Eberle touches the high-water mark of her more objective figures.
Here it will be more interesting to note the steps by which social values have crept into her work.
First of all, her deep and instinctive love for children, and her appreciation of human values, led her to select types that until recently have been almost entirely disregarded.
To this keen observer and lover of human nature, the many years of contact with this vivid, arduous East Side life—reinforced and interpreted by constant reading and thinking—brought an ever-increasing sense of social interrelation and interdependence. Jane Addams’ books have, more than anything else, she says, helped to clarify and mould her vision of the constructive part the sculptor may play in social readjustment.
This growth of social consciousness has been reflected in her work.
[Illustration:
THE LITTLE MOTHER ]
Just as The Windy Doorstep, with its fine feeling for the dignity of everyday homely tasks, outranks the Roller Skater which, she says, was done in a purely objective spirit, so the White Slave records a forward step which is a difference of kind even more than degree.
[Illustration:
_THE RAG PICKER_ ]
Here she has turned from her more objective work to the graphic interpretation of a social menace; and it is here, perhaps, that she finds herself with surest touch. Her conception of white slavery is as searching in its indictment, as ruthless, cruel and scourging as the fact itself. One visitor who saw those haunting figures at the International Exhibition said afterward:
“I was passing through that room of the exhibit when suddenly I faced it—I could not go on. I had vaguely realized that this horrible thing was in the world, but it had never touched _me_. I sat there for perhaps an hour, thinking—and thinking—”
This woman was one who has led what is called a “sheltered” existence, whose instinct would be to turn from any discussion or writing on this subject. It is this thought-compelling quality in such work which links it as a social force with, say, the dispassionate but terrible report of the Chicago Vice Commission, or with Elizabeth Robins’ My Little Sister.
It is interesting to know that Miss Eberle worked out the composition for the White Slave four years ago; but the actual work of modelling was done in the four weeks’ interval between the time she was invited to send some of her work to last winter’s International Art Exhibition and its opening. Until then, she had felt that the time had perhaps not come when such a group would be received except as an unwelcome effort toward sensationalism. It is the first of several such interpretative subjects which she has in mind, and which, if worked out in an equally sincere spirit, should be big in social significance.
But after all is said, Miss Eberle consistently holds with the many who believe that the first function of art is not didactic. Much of her work besides that shown here is conceived in a spirit of sheer joy in beauty of form and line, and one may go far to find a more exquisitely modelled figure than that of the utterly submissive, despairful child-victim of the white slaver. To use her own words:
“It is the beauty that is in the world _today_ that appeals to me—not what may have existed centuries ago in Greece. Though I love that, too, I will not shut my eyes to the present and continue to echo the past. No matter how ugly the present might be, I would rather live in it. After all, ugliness, as well as beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,—and the present _isn’t_ ugly at all, but full of a wonderful interest, as a few of us are beginning to find out. We are trying to find new bottles for new wine—Greek vases are about worn out.”
[Illustration:
_THE BATH HOUR_ ]
And so we may, as she asks, leave her work to make its own eloquent plea for what Emerson calls “the eternal picture that nature paints in the street, with moving men and children, beggars and fine ladies, ... capped and based by heaven, earth and sea.”
“MY LITTLE SISTER”
HARRIET BURTON LAIDLAW
[_Mrs. Laidlaw is chairman of Manhattan Borough of the Woman Suffrage Party. Her special interest in the subject of this review is due, among other things, to her friendship with Rose Livingston, the rescue worker in Chinatown whose unique experience gives her understanding sympathy with unfortunate girls, and who has suffered persecution, unchecked by the police, on account of her revelations in regard to the white slave trade._—Ed.]
In My Little Sister[10] Elizabeth Robins has let us hear a great cry out of the depths—an actual human cry.
True, many snug, comfortable people, shaken for a moment out of their apathy, dismiss it all carelessly, even contemptuously. Many who are gripped to the heart as they read brush away the tears with a sign of relief and say, “Well, it’s only a story.” But what a “story!”
It is told in a tense, staccato style which hurries the reader on—on even through the idealistic descriptions of the English country and the stretching moor, across which, in its little garden planted by loving hands, stands the “dear home” of the officer’s gentle widow and her two daughters, the Elder Sister in whose words the story is told and whose name is never mentioned, and the Little Sister, Bettina, all golden and bright, a creature so touchingly exquisite, so like a flower.
Through the sweet, lightly sketched scenes of the childhood, girlhood and dawning womanhood of these two fair young creatures there is woven a dark thread of fear, dread, tragedy. Some experience of brutality this dainty, tenderly devoted mother has had, an experience which is never more than darkly hinted at. She forgets the terror of it only in those happy memories that cluster about her lover-husband. His body was brought home to her from a fatal tiger hunt. Her only consolation in his loss, she tells the Elder Sister, was that she knew that there are worse dangers than those of the jungle! She had the joy of knowing that he died while all was “bright and untarnished.”
The narrative hastens on, always with a hovering sense of doom. The innocent, tender love stories of the sisters develop. They are but seventeen and nineteen, but they are women. It is impossible to do justice to the telling of this story, so we will pass to the main event, the invitation of the London aunt, the failing health and fortune of the mother, which nerves her to accept an offer that will separate her from her children, and the almost happy bustle of preparation for the first visit from home, and for that wonder of wonders—a London season! The sinister part played by Madame Aurore, the little London dressmaker who, while working for them in their country home lays the plans that are to decoy them to their ruin in London, is worked out with sure, rapid touch. Then comes the arrival in London, the meeting of the girls by the pseudo “aunt,” who has been dressed for the part by the aid of a photograph sent on to the procurers by Madame Aurore. Then follows the terrible scene in the house with the barred windows and the strange overwhelming scent, the escape of the Elder Sister, the heart-breaking search for the younger—the madness, the despair! One of the most pathetic things in the book is the heart-broken young lover who traces Bettina from London to “their house in Paris”—thence from one place to another “always too late.” The merciful death of the mother, and the fixed conviction, the subliminal inspiration, that comes toward the end to the tortured brain of the elder sister that Bettina has found her release in death, alleviate and spiritualize the misery of it all.
Now as to the truth of this tremendous story. I suppose that having put the very soul of truth and reality into the narrative itself, having written it from the very depths of her own pitying heart, the author has not reckoned with the callous incredulity which the book often meets, or she might well have added an introductory note in regard to the actual facts in this case from real life. The story, she told me subsequent to its publication, was absolutely true, but much softened at many points. In the true story, for instance, the mother is not dead, but is in a state of dementia on the continent, whither the family have moved, being unable to endure England and its memories.