M. Nijinski in "Le dieu bleu" CHARACTERISTIC POSES IN THE RUSSIAN BALLET as profound and altogether as worthy as the message of any other art. More sympathetically and understandingly than through any other medium, it is evident that America is prepared to receive the message of poetry through the interpretation of great dancing. And equally with any other nation of this or past times, it is now ready to support an institution devoted to the cultivation of that art. The existence of an esthetic enthusiasm of more dynamic force than would suffice for a crusade places at once an opportunity and a responsibility in the hands of those whom circumstances have made leaders in this country's esthetic progress.1 1 Thanks are due to the Frederick A. Stokes Company for permission to use some of the illustrations of this article, which appeared in the author's book, "The Dance." WAR1 BY OLIVE SCHREINER I that struggle of the human creature to T may be said: "What then of war, attain its ends by physical force and at the price of the life of others: will Woman take part in that also?" We reply: Yes; more particularly in that field we intend to play our part. We have always borne part of the weight of war, and the major part. It is not that in primitive times we suffered from the destruction of the fields we tilled and the houses we built; it is not that later as domestic laborers and producers, though unwaged, we, in taxes and material loss and additional labor, paid as much as our male towards the cost of war; it is not that in a comparatively insignificant manner, as nurses of the wounded in modern times, or now and again as warrior chieftainesses and leaders in primitive and other societies, we have borne our part; nor is it even because the spirit of resolution in its women and their willingness to endure, has in all ages, again and again largely determined the fate of a race that goes to war, that we demand our controlling right where war is concerned. Our relation to war is far more intimate, personal, and indissoluble than this. Men have made boomerangs, bows, swords, or guns with which to destroy one another; we have made the men who destroyed and were destroyed! We have in all ages produced, at an enormous cost, the primal munition of war, without which no other would exist. There is no battlefield on earth, nor ever has been, howsoever covered with slain, which it has not cost the women of the race more in actual bloodshed and anguish to supply, than it has cost the men who lie there. We pay the first cost on all human life. enced by the men who cover it; but, in the long months of rearing that follow, the women of the race go through a long, patiently endured strain which no knapsacked soldier on his longest march has ever more than equalled; while, even in the matter of death, in all civilized societies, the probability that the average woman will die in child-birth is immeasurably greater than the probability that the average male will die in battle. In supplying the men for the carnage of a battlefield, women have not merely lost actually more blood, and gone through a more acute anguish and weariness, in the long months of bearing and in the final agony of child-birth, than has been experi1 From "Woman and Labor," by Olive Schreiner. There is, perhaps, no woman, whether she have borne children, or be merely potentially a child-bearer, who could look down upon a battlefield covered with slain, but the thought would rise in her, "So many mothers' sons! So many young bodies brought into the world to lie there! So many months of weariness and pain while bones and muscles were shaped within! So many hours of anguish and struggle that breath might be! So many baby mouths drawing life at women's breasts;-all this, that men might lie with glazed eyeballs, and swollen faces, and fixed, blue, unclosed mouths, and great limbs tossed this, that an acre of ground might be manured with human flesh, that next year's grass or poppies or karoo bushes may spring up greener and redder, where they have lain, or that the sand of a plain may have a glint of white bones!" And we cry, "Without an inexorable cause this must not be!" No woman who is a woman says of a human body, "It is nothing!".. Nor will women shrink from war because they lack courage. Earth's women of every generation have faced suffering and death with an equanimity that no soldier on a battlefield has ever surpassed and few have equalled; and where war has been to preserve life, or land, or freedom, rather than for aggrandisement and power, unparasitised and laboring women have in all ages known how to bear an active part, and die. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company. It is not because of woman's cowardice, incapacity, nor, above all, because of her general superior virtue, that she will end war when her voice is fully and clearly heard in the governance of states -it is because, on this one point, and on this point almost alone, the knowledge of woman, simply as woman, is superior to that of man; she knows the history of human flesh; she knows its cost; he does not. In a besieged city, it might well happen that men in the streets might seize upon statues and marble carvings from public buildings and galleries and hurl them in to stop the breaches made in their ramparts by the enemy, unconsideringly and merely because they came first to hand, not valuing them more than had they been pavingstones. One man, however, could not do this the sculptor. Men's bodies are our woman's works of art. Given to us power to control, we will never carelessly throw them in to fill up the gaps in human relationships made. by international ambitions and greeds. The thought would never come to us as women, "Cast in men's bodies; settle the thing so!" Arbitration and compensation would as naturally occur to her as cheaper and simpler methods of bridging the gaps in national relationships, as to the sculptor it would occur to throw in anything rather than statuary, though he might be driven to that at last! This is one of those phases of human life, not very numerous, but very important, towards which the man as man, and the woman as woman, on the mere ground of their different sexual function with regard to reproduction, stand, and must stand, at a somewhat differing angle. The physical creation of human life, which, in as far as the male is concerned, consists in a few moments of physical pleasure, to the female must always signify months of pressure and physical endurance, crowned with danger to life. To the male, the giving To the male, the giving of life is a laugh; to the female, blood, anguish, and sometimes death. Here we touch one of the few yet important differences between man and woman as such. The twenty thousand men prematurely slain on a field of battle, mean, to the women of their race, twenty thousand human creatures to be borne within them for months, given birth to in anguish, fed from their breasts and reared with toil, if the numbers of the tribe and the strength of the nation are to be maintained. In nations continually at war, incessant and unbroken child-bearing is by war imposed on all women if the state is to survive; and whenever war occurs, if numbers are to be maintained, there must be an increased child-bearing and rearing. This throws upon woman as woman a war tax, compared with which all that the male expends in military preparations is comparatively light. The relations of the female towards the production of human life influence undoubtedly even her relation towards animal and all life. "It is a fine day, let us go out and kill something!" cries the typical male of certain races, instinctively; "There is a living thing, it will die if it is not cared for," says the average woman, almost equally instinctively. It is true that the woman will sacrifice as mercilessly, as cruelly, the life of a hated rival or an enemy, as any male; but she always knows what she is doing, and the value of the life she takes! There is no lighthearted, careless enjoyment in the sacrifice of life to the normal woman. But for the vast bulk of humanity, probably for generations to come, the instinctive antagonism of the human childbearer to reckless destruction of that which she has at so much cost produced will probably be necessary to educate the race to any clear conception of the bestiality and insanity of war. War will pass when intellectual culture and activity have made possible to the female an equal share in the control and governance of modern national life; it will probably not pass away much sooner; its extinction will not be delayed much longer. It is especially in the domain of war that we, the bearers of men's bodies, who supply its most valuable munition, who, not amid the clamor and ardor of battle, but singly, and alone, with a three-in-themorning courage, shed our blood and face death that the battlefield might have its food, a food more precious to us than our heart's blood; it is we especially who, in the domain of war, have our word to say, a word no man can say for us. It is our intention to enter into the domain of war and to labor there till in the course of generations we have extinguished it. MY VISIT TO AUBER BY FRANCIS GRIERSON T the appointed time for my visit to at the hotel. A short walk brought us to the rue Bergère and the conservatoire. On learning that the director could not receive us for twenty minutes or more, David conducted me into the court. It was rectangular, as if in keeping with some strange combination of music and mathematics. My guide looked at me with that air of mingled self-complacency and bland cynicism peculiar to his temperament, and began to prepare me for the presence of the most-feared and most-respected musical celebrity of Paris, the octogenarian Auber, whose jokes, bons mots, and persiflage were almost as famous as his operas, and whose compositions had for sixty years represented the national spirit of French. music. I was informed that Auber had been director of the conservatoire for the extraordinary period of twenty-nine years; that, besides being the most celebrated French composer living, his wit and humor were as spontaneous and perennial as his music; and that, all things considered, he was a very wonderful man. And I found it all true; for now if I were asked to name the most typical Frenchman I ever met, I should not hesitate to name Auber. He was the embodiment of the spontaneity, the vivacity, and the genius of the French character of that epoch. He put into his music what Béranger put into French poetry. David, after a good deal of talk about. the conservatoire, said: "This courtyard is not gay." "No," I remarked; "it is enough to put a damper on the aspirations of any novice coming here in search of harmony and inspiration." "Ah," he said, "the conservatoire itself is one of the gayest and most amusing places in Paris. No one dies of ennui here, although one or two have had endings that were tragic enough." Just then I heard sounds of the tuning of stringed instruments, and David added: "At present you will hear a curious confusion of noises that you will find the reverse of musical; it is about this time the charivari begins." Indeed, it was beginning effectively. From a window at our right the sounds of viols sent forth gruntings that were answered by high squeaks from fiddles in another room; here and there could be heard the quacking of clarinets, the piping of flutes, the rumbling of the violoncello, the bleating of the hautboys, and over all the high note of an incipient prima donna, or a young man with a cold trying to reach an impossible pitch. It required no great powers of imagination to form a mental picture of all the lunatics in Paris assembled here for a grand operatic rehearsal. David, seeing my surprise, recounted a joke uttered by Auber in this same courtyard not long before. The director was escorting a distinguished visitor through the surprises of the conservatoire, and when they had gotten to the middle of this court the visitor halted to listen, bewildered with the bedlam of conflicting sounds. Suddenly a terrible cry came from one of the windows in front of them. Auber, always on the alert for a jest, tapped his visitor on the shoulder, with the reassuring remark: "Don't be alarmed: it 's the bleeding hour; they are only taking a few ounces from a tenor. It will be the turn of the basso next; he was at a banquet last night, and they will take at least half a pint from him." At which the visitor, more bewildered than ever, looked what he could not speak. could not speak. Then Auber added, with a malicious twinkle in his brown eyes: "No, this is not a slaughter-house; we only tame them here. The slaughtering occurs when they make their début." At last, after waiting for more than half an hour, we went up-stairs, and were shown into the director's reception-room. I found myself in the presence of the greatest little man I ever encountered. Not that he looked distinguished. He might have passed for an old-clothes man had he been dressed somewhat differently. He was in his eighty-sixth year, and appeared about sixty. His face had that look of calm contentment that comes only with years of success and established authority. He received me with mingled affability and indifference. His questions were abrupt, matter-of-fact, much as if I had come to take his measure for a suit of clothes or to talk about the price of stocks. I had not been in the room more than two or three minutes when he asked me to take my seat at the piano and improvise. Had he asked me to stand on my head it would have been just the same. The small upright instrument looked about as old as the little nonchalant, don't-care-afiddlestick director, and I pictured to my self an auction mart, with the piano-stool a weighing-machine, with an indicator pointing now to fair, now to middling, now to good or very good, and I could only think of the words: "This pig weighs so many pounds, so many ounces"; or, "This gift-horse has had his mouth examined; I have seen worse horses given away, and end by winning the Grand Prix." I was so filled with the humor of the situation that I ceased playing and asked to be excused from further effort. I became absorbed in the personality of the director, who seemed greatly puzzled. "What can I say?" he remarked to David. I did not shrink from hearing his judgment; on this question my mind was a blank. After some moments' reflection he added: "You see, this is a special talent. You remember that young man, Jules Guérin, from Marseilles? No, you don't remember him; it was during Cherubini's directorship. Well, young Guérin could play only by ear, but this young man"—referring to me-"does not imitate; he improvises; and you tell me he has never been able to learn music. It is very curious. We have never had such a pupil here. With him music must be altogether intuitional. You know yourself, as an old pupil of the conservatoire, that we have no rules here for intuition.' "Precisely," said David; "I desire only to have your opinion. His place in the musical world is quite exceptional; he not only cannot master the rules of harmony, but he cannot even read music at sight, and he tells me he has given up trying to learn." "Ah," exclaimed Auber, "c'est tout à fait extraordinaire!" He looked at me as if in the short interval I had grown horns and might become formidable. But when David said, "What is still more curious, he comes of an unmusical family," the good director simply sat down and looked at me, while he muttered to himself, "C'est incroyable!" "What he has played here to-day is insignificant compared with what I have heard him play elsewhere." This remark brought Auber out of his reverie. "I know very well," he said, "this is not the place for the full expression of a talent like that. Come to déjeuner with me to-morrow; then the young man will feel more at ease, and his music, I am certain, will be very different." Auber lived in his own house, 24 rue St.-Georges. When we arrived there on the following day an octogenarian concierge directed us to the floor above, where we were told a valet de chambre would usher us into the presence of Auber. David rang, and the door was opened by a wrinkled and frigid valet with the air of a manikin and as old as the concierge. He gave us an icy reception. He did not take the trouble to announce our names, but told us to go ahead unannounced, as if we were on our way to commit suicide; but, despite our frigid reception at the door, we found Auber awaiting us and in the best of humor, We were soon seated at table, and another servant made his appearance, older, if possible, than any we had yet seen, and I became aware that I was in a habitation of walking shadows. Auber had five domestics, the youngest, whom he called the baby, being the coachman, who was seventy-five. The director told us this coachman had been only thirty-five years in his service. Auber must have guessed what our thoughts were, for he playfully referred to his domestics several times during the meal. "You eat very little, cher Maître," remarked David. "I find one meal a day sufficient," was Auber's reply; and I thought to myself, "That is all that is necessary to keep so contented a spirit in so small a body." |