Various

“ Who has the youth has the future—and this is why the future belongs to Nietzsche; for no contemporary so gathers the youth under his shining banner. And it is because the moral seething of our time, our struggle with questions of the moral life, are recapitulated and epitomized in Nietzsche, that he stands out, like an Alpine apocalypse, as the new prophet of our new day. The mysterious need of a man to find himself in another, another in himself, as deep calls unto deep or star shines unto star, is met in the resources of the great personality of Nietzsche. ”

“ Announcement “The realm of art is prodigious; next to life itself the vastest realm of man’s experience.”
Appreciation has its outlet in art; and art (to complete the circle and the figure) has its source in—owes its whole current—to appreciation. That is, the tides of art would cease to ebb and flow were it not for the sun and moon of appreciation.
This function of the sun and moon is known as criticism. But criticism as an art has not flourished in this country. We live too swiftly to have time to be appreciative; and criticism, after all, has only one synonym: appreciation. ”

“ It is my feeling that Tagore will suggest to the modern man such a religion. He gives expression, though not, of course, perfect expression, to a synthesis of many latent instincts of the modern mind. He glories in understanding, not only facts and truth, but emotions and all manifestations of life. He calls us to see vivid beauty wherever it is found. He acclaims the aid of science in extending man’s personality throughout the universe. He sees the oneness of all life, and bids man stand erect on account of this eternal and timeless force coursing through him. ”

“ Why is it that in some places there is such a feeling of life being all one; not merely a long picture-show for human eyes, but a single breathing, glowing, growing thing, of which we are no more important a part than the swallows and magpies, the foals and sheep in the meadows, the sycamores and ash trees and flowers in the fields, the rocks and little bright streams, or even than the long fleecy clouds and their soft-shouting drivers, the winds?—John Galsworthy in The Atlantic Monthly. ”

“ A revived, renascent heathenism, even as compared with Christianity, would mean a reactionary and outlived form of life. That men of moral endeavor and scientific vision could hope for a substitute for Christianity, a conquest over Christianity, in a rebirth of paganism, is a new riddle of the Sphinx.
One way only remains out of the aberration and dividedness of our present life: not backward, but forward! No winning of a religious view of the world in any other way! No pursuit of the tasks of the moral life by those who seek a real part and place in the modern world, in any other way! ”

“ To a young friend she wrote, begging that he keep ploughing through things afresh, telling him that he “must always have the courage to hurt himself with questioning and doubts; to destroy the most comfortable and beautiful edifice of thought—one that might have stood for life—if honesty demands it.” And so, having thought out things in the most utter freedom, unhampered by old preconceptions, and finally unafraid of the starkness of the truths which she faced, she let nothing prescribed be her unchallenged guide or stand as a substitute for her own vigor and hardness of thinking. ”

“ She’s too strong to be hard, too steel-like to be robust. She’s like fire and keen air—to borrow another poet’s phrase. She reflects life through the mirror of a vivid personality—which is one way of being an important artist. She assumes that you’re also vivid, and quick, and subtle, and this gives her writing the most beautiful quality of nervousness—the kind you mean when you’re not talking about nerves. In short, Ethel Sidgwick is the most definitely magnetic personality I’ve ever felt through a book’s pages. ”

“ The new note in the craft of writing is in danger, as are all new and beautiful things born into the world, of being talked to death in the cradle. Already a cult of the new has sprung up, and doddering old fellows, yellow with their sins, run here and there crying out that they are true prophets of the new, just as, following last year’s exhibit, every age-sick American painter began hastily to inject into his own work something clutched out of the seething mass of new forms and new effects scrawled upon the canvases by the living young cubists and futurists. ”

“ Of what nature, then, must be the religion of the modern man and woman? First of all, it must not be imposed from without; it must grow through the personality and find its being there. It must not only square with every known fact of science and thought; it must stimulate to a fervent desire for new understanding. It must not deny or destroy life; it must be life’s essence. It must ring with a call to the individual to assume his proper dignity of life. ”

“ He sees the oneness of humanity, and the necessity of perfecting human relations. He depicts purity without asceticism, vigor without brutality. He emphasizes joy and action. He does not blink the fact of death, but robs it of horror by showing it as the natural end of a victorious life. While he encourages by the idea of an ultimate goal, he inspires by the conception of a real connection with infinity here and now. Revering the universal life, he sees that it finds expression only in individuals, and that the law of our being must be to live as completely as possible. ”

“ At least we have got to the age when we realize that all beautiful things make a place for themselves sooner or later in the world. And we hope to be very beautiful!
If you’ve ever read poetry with a feeling that it was your religion, your very life; if you’ve ever come suddenly upon the whiteness of a Venus in a dim, deep room; if you’ve ever felt music replacing your shabby soul with a new one of shining gold ”

“ Well, we are in a condition like that today, only it is not love, it is work that has lost its dignity in the lives of women. It is not love, it is work from which one-half of womankind refrains as from something at once disagreeable and ungenteel, while the other half of womankind performs it under conditions disastrous to health and spirit.
There is need today for a book preaching to women the gospel of work. It is time to break down the prejudice which makes one-half of womankind lead incomplete and futile, because idle, lives. We need a book to show women what work should mean to them. ”

“ The fact that he’s never used it is the one flaw in his performances, for no other instrument that I’ve heard gives you the same sense of drowning in great waves of warm sound. The combination would convince even the followers of the new gods. But, old or new, and even on his cold Steinway, no one has ever drawn from the piano the same quality of golden tone or dared such simplicity of singing as Paderewski. To put his genius into a sentence: no one has ever built so strong a bridge across the gulf that yawns between vision and accomplishment. ”

“ Dunn’s book stands in a different class: there is no mistaking its absolute first-hand reflection of life—the life of strange, motley hordes of drifting outcasts and adventurers. But unlike the Jack London school, he never forgets that man is a little lower than the angels, as well as a little higher than the beasts; he never loses sight of the innate greatness of humanity, the greater spiritual as well as physical heights to which he may aspire.... The book is good, big, significant, coming as it does in a season when the absolute dearth of vital fiction is painfully apparent. ”

“ Conversely, might there not be men who come to us in wolves’ clothing, but whose hearts are tender and rich and intimate with a pure and noble humanity? We know such men. Friedrich Nietzsche was one of them. He was a true prophet. All his transvaluations dealt deadly blows at the old, false, man-poisoning prophetism. What if more morals matured in this immoralist, more Christianity in this anti-Christ, more divinity in this atheist, than in all the pronouncements of all those who today still are so swift to despise and damn what they do not understand? ”

“ Just so far as any woman of today has become interested in her own thoughts and work, is the originator of ideas, and knows the joy of making or doing something that more than all else in the world she wants to make or do, so far she is nearer to becoming of the size of this great woman.
Such a woman will share with Rahel Varnhagen the certainty that higher morality is reached only through higher liberty; such a woman must demand, as did Rahel, periods of that recuperative and strengthening solitude, both of thought and mode of living, which only the self-reliant and fearless can endure. ”

“ It seems you are setting out to watch the street of Life from a high balcony, where at all events the air should be fresh and sunrise sometimes visible. I hope you will decide to sleep out there under the stars, for what kills most literary effort is the hothouse air of temples, clubs, and coteries, that, never changed, breeds in us by turn febrility and torpor. Enthusiasms are more convincing from those who have not told their loves too often. And criticism more poignant from one who has been up at dawn, seen for himself and put down his impression before he goes on ’Change. ”

“ For the secret of Kreisler’s personality and his music lies in that finely balanced combination of qualities: a sensuousness that would be a little overpowering, a little drugging, without the gigantic strength that seems to hold it in leash. That balance makes possible his little air of military jauntiness, of sad Vienna gayety; it gives him that huge effect of power that always makes me feel I’m watching the king of the forest stride through his kingdom. You need never expect emotionalism from this musician; he’s too strong to give you anything but passion. ”

“ If we find our happiness in action, how shall our descendants find happiness when there are no more evils to conquer? Though a static condition of blessedness be the goal of humanitarian endeavor, it is the progress toward it which furnishes the joy.
The Oriental thinker has looked for his answer in a different direction. Though the individual is partial and unsuccessful, life as a whole is always triumphant. Cannot the individual by contemplation identify himself with the world-soul? Can he not tack himself on to this all-inclusive life by denial and forgetfulness of himself? ”

“ In the trade of writing the so-called new note is as old as the world. Simply stated, it is a cry for the reinjection of truth and honesty into the craft; it is an appeal from the standards set up by money-making magazine and book publishers in Europe and America to the older, sweeter standards of the craft itself; it is the voice of the new man, come into a new world, proclaiming his right to speak out of the body and soul of youth, rather than through the bodies and souls of the master craftsmen who are gone. ”

“ Since George Eliot and the Brontës, I can think of no woman who has focused art and life so intensely into novel writing—though even as I say this Ethan Frome looms up and leaves me a little uncomfortable. But the important thing is that Ethel Sidgwick is going to count—enormously.
People who aren’t yet aware of her (and there seem to be a lot of them) can be easily explained as that body of the public that neglects a masterpiece until it has become the fashion to acclaim it. But Ethel Sidgwick has written a novel that’s more important than any number of our traditional masterpieces. ”

“ In all the world there is no such thing as an old sunrise, an old wind upon the cheeks, or an old kiss from the lips of your beloved; and in the craft of writing there can be no such thing as age in the souls of the young poets and novelists who demand for themselves the right to stand up and be counted among the soldiers of the new. ”

“ Classical perfection is no longer interesting; Beethoven seems no longer to comprehend all music—in fact, the people who have no rebellions about the sterility of the old symphonies are quite beyond my range of understanding. But Paderewski plays the old music in a new way, gives it such vitality of meaning that you feel it’s just been born—or, better, perhaps, that its composers have been triumphantly revalued, rejustified in their claim for eternal life. ”

“ Law, morals—are not these perhaps a blunder of history, an old hereditary woe with which humanity is weighted down?
This doubt—long and ominously maturing throughout the spiritual evolution of our new time—finds its most radical, most conscious, and most eloquent expression in Friedrich Nietzsche. He launches this doubt not only against all that has been believed and thought and done, but against all that men believe and think and do today. He shakes every position which men have held to be unshakable. ”

“ No one has ever played Chopin like Paderewski; no one has ever made such simple, haunting melodies of the nocturnes; no one has ever struck such ringing Polish music out of the polonaises, or such wind-swept cadences from the Berceuse; no one has ever played the Funeral March so like a cosmic procession—the mighty moving of humanity from birth to death and new life ”

“ And the value of Rahel to us lies in the calm directness, the “innocence,” as she herself calls it, of her thinking. To her went the acclaimed wise men of the day for the comfort of her fearlessness and simplicity of thought upon their questions. She was said to be brilliant. She was not brilliant in the sense of being learned, or of being capable of mere intellectual jugglery and fantastic adroitness of thinking; she was brilliant in the crystal clearness and the sure rapidity of her thinking. ”

“ Nothing in all of this new is new except this—that beside the youth dancing in the dust of the falling timbers is a maiden also dancing and proclaiming herself. “We will have a world not half new but all new!” cry the youth and the maiden, dancing together.
Do not be led aside by the many voices crying of the new. Be ready to accept hardship for the sake of your craft in America—that is craft love. ”

“ Hence our culture has lost faith in itself. Our civilization is played out. What the Germans call Weltschmerz has come over us. Philosophers have fashioned it into systems; singers, into song—the sad but not sweet music of humanity; sufferers all, into a sharp cry for redemption. Deniers of the malady must have their eyes opened by physicians, scurrying around curatively in this humanity.
First of all, there are those who borrow their panacea from religion. They demand a reform of the ecclesiastical life according to the sense and spirit of primitive Christianity. ”