ROOSEVELT AND BRANDES

My first meeting with Theodore Roosevelt, though brief, will be ever memorable for me. I was not precisely “summoned” to Oyster Bay on Election Day early in November, 1915, though I gladly accepted Col. Roosevelt’s invitation in the light of a “royal command,” and went over to Long Island in company with John Quinn, who had arranged the meeting, and Francis J. Heney, once public prosecutor in San Francisco. I had received several letters from the Colonel of Colonels, of which I recall two significant sentences. One ended: “What a trump John Quinn is!” The other begins: “I have just received your New Cosmopolis. My son Kermit, whose special delight is New York, would probably appreciate it more than I do, for I am a countryman rather than a man of the pavements.” Now, I had always thought of Theodore Roosevelt as a “man of the pavements,” notwithstanding his delight in rough-riding across Western prairies. Personally I found him the reverse of either: a scholarly man, fond of music and the fine arts—he showed me a number of canvases by the late Marcius Simmons, a young American painter, who had been greatly influenced by Turner. The colonel had an excellent library of Colonial literature, and was fond of digging out pregnant sentences for quotation in his speeches from early preachers and statesmen. He appeared to be interested in my comparison between his prose style and the prose style of President Woodrow Wilson: the one swift, concise, full of affirmations, striking sentences, and notable for its absence of glitter. For the colonel reality was greater than rhetoric; while the prose of Mr. Wilson is eminently professorial, preserving as it does a nice balance of sound and sense; above all, “literary” prose, the prose of the study, never dynamic, seldom brilliant; prose “standardized,” eighteenth-century, smooth, sinuous, flexible, and ever-illuding prose.

My distinguished host showed some of the trophies he had acquired in Europe when on that historic grand tour; and, as I had not visited him in the guise of a professional interviewer, I did not write at the time of what I saw; but now I may do so without violating the intimacies of private hospitality. One thing that interested me was a photograph of the late Andrew Carnegie, taken in Berlin during the military manœuvres; both Carnegie and Roosevelt had been guests of William Hohenzollern, then Kaiser. I told the colonel that I had been present at the formal opening of the Peace Palace, in September, 1913, at The Hague, and that the day had been so hot that all Holland, there represented, had fled to the beach at Scheveningen, adding that I believed the palace eventually would be turned into the handsomest café in Europe; and I had printed this prophecy (?) in The Times Sunday Magazine, when reporting the solemn humbuggery of the peaceful house-warming.

War was discussed with all the zest of the wonderful man. One question I permitted myself: “Colonel, would the Lusitania have been sunk if you had been in the White House?” Snapping his formidable jaw, he exclaimed: “There would have been no Lusitania incident if I had been President.”

Among other various topics the colonel descanted on the poetical merits of George Cabot Lodge, son of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who died in the very harvest time of his genius. In his introduction to the two volumes of Poems and Dramas, Theodore Roosevelt has never written with such a happy mingling of perspicacity and tempered enthusiasm. Among the younger American poets I find Lodge of importance, not along because of his potential promise, but because of his actual performance. An authentic poet, his versatility is marked. In his sonnets and lyrics he paid the admiring tribute of youth to Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Meredith, and Swinburne. He could mimic Walt Whitman, who is fatally easy to parody, and he early succumbed to Schopenhauer and Baudelaire. In at least one of his dramas I found the cosmic ecstasy of Nietzsche; also the doctrine of the Eternal Return. But young Lodge had assimilated a half dozen cultures, and passed far out to sea the perilous rocks of imitation, upon which so many lesser talents have come to grief. When as an achievement we consider his Herakles we are amazed at its maturity of thought and technical finish. The poet, the Maker, confronts us, and in reclothing the antique and tragic myth with his own lovely language he is, nevertheless, a “modern.” I know few poets of the new school who may boast this sense of the vital present, added to a divination and an evocation of “old, unhappy far-off things and battles long ago.” His figures are not fashioned by academic black magic, but are vital beings, loving, trusting, suffering, and in conflict with ineluctable destiny. He had the lyric art, also the architectural. He was a singer and a builder of the lofty rhyme. His handling of complex forms and abstruse rhymes was remarkable. George Cabot Lodge possessed both voice and vision. His life, by Henry Adams, shows him to have been a young man beloved by his friends, among whom were Jonathan Stickney Trumbull, Langdon Mitchell, and the late Sir Cecil Spring-Rice. When I met him in Paris he was a student at the Sorbonne. It was about 1896. A charming youth. I may only add now my humble mite of admiration to the manes of this dead genius.

When I saw Dr. Georg Brandes at the Hotel Astor a few months before the outbreak of the Great War I told him that he resembled the bust made of him by Klinger. It was the first time I had talked to the celebrated Danish author, to whom I had dedicated Egoists. Then past seventy, as active as a young man, I could see no reason why he shouldn’t live to be a centenarian. An active brain is lodged in his nimble body. I had made up my mind to ask him no questions about America. I found him in a rage over the way he was misquoted by some of the interviewers. It should be remembered that primarily he is a cosmopolitan thinker. He writes in English, French, German, and Danish with equal ease. As to the provinciality of our country’s literature and the seven arts he has definite opinions; but he was polite enough not to rub them in on me. He was accused of finding his favorite reading in the “works” of Jack London! That idea amused him. Among our “moderns” it is Frank Norris he likes; a slight difference, indeed. Emerson, Poe, Whitman interested him, though not as iconoclasts or pathfinders. The originality of this trinity he didn’t dwell upon; made-over Europeans, he called them; Emerson and German transcendental philosophy; Poe and E. T. W. Hoffmann; Whitman and Ossian—Walt’s rugged speech is a windy parody of MacPherson’s, and Ossian himself is a windy parody of the Old Testament style.

Brandes is an iconoclast, a radical, a non-conformist born, and more often a No-Sayer than a Yes-Sayer. The many-headed monster has no message for him. As he was the first European critic to give us true pictures of Ibsen and Nietzsche, I led him to speak of the poet-philosopher. At Baireuth, where I had gone to hear the Wagner music-drama at its fountainhead—and very muddy was the music-making, I am sorry to say—I was shown the house where was born Max Stirner. My friend said: “When the very name of Richard Wagner is forgotten, Stirner’s will be in the mouth of the world.” Of course, this sounded improbable. I know Stirner’s book, The Ego and Its Own, knew his real name, Johann Kaspar Schmidt, and that he had been a poor, half-starved school-master in Berlin, and, in 1845, imprisoned by the Prussian Government. This intellectual anarch—rather call him nihilist, for, compared with his nihilism, Bakunin’s is only revolutionary resistance—was to become later the most powerful disrupting force in Europe! I couldn’t believe it. But now I recall my friend’s prophecy when I read of the doings of the Russian Bolsheviki. Not Nietzsche, but Stirner, has been the real motor force in the contemporary revolution. No half-way house of socialism for the Reds! And that is the lesson of Artzibachev’s Sanine, the import of which the majority of critics missed, partially because of the imperfect English translation—many suppressions—and also because they missed the significance of the new man, who, while continuing the realistic tradition of Dostoievsky and Tolstoy, was diametrically opposed to their sentimental Brotherhood of Man—toujours that old fallacy of Rousseau!—and preached the fiercest individualism, violently repudiating Nietzsche and his aristocratic individualism. It may be said in passing that a reaction to individualism is bound to come; the lesson of the war will not be lost. Nor the teaching of Emerson. After the present overt suppression of the individual, the pendulum will surely swing from tyrannical socialism to the greater freedom of the individual. And it can’t come quickly enough here in America.

Dr. Brandes sets more store by Nietzsche than Stirner; he was the first to call Nietzsche a “radical aristocrat.” We switched to the theme of Strindberg. Brandes said: “Yes, he was mad. Once he visited me and told me of a call he had made at a lunatic asylum near Stockholm. He rang the bell and asked the physician if he—Strindberg, the greatest of dramatists—was crazy; to which the doctor replied: ‘My dear Mr. Strindberg, if you will only consent to stay with me six weeks and talk with me every day, I promise to answer your question.’” After that Brandes had no doubts on the question. Brandes is not only the discoverer of Ibsen, Nietzsche, and Strindberg, but he himself is a revaluer of old valuations. Therein lies his significance for this generation. In 1888 he wrote to Nietzsche: “I have been the best hated man in the north for the last four years. The newspapers rave against me every day, especially since my long feud with Bjornson, in which all the ‘moral’ German newspapers take sides against me.”... To-day he is regarded as a reactionary by the Reds. The affections of Brandes have always been bestowed upon the literatures of England and France. Of his Main Currents, Maurice Bigeon has said that Brandes did for the nineteenth century what Sainte-Beuve did for the seventeenth century in his History of Port Royal. What is vital, what makes for progress, what has lasting influence in social life? asks the Dane in his Main Currents. He will remain the archetype of cosmopolitan critics for future generations. A humanist, the mind of Brandes is steel-colored. Ductile, when white-hot, it flows like lava from a volcano in eruption; but always is it steel, whether liquefied or rigid. Pre-eminently it is the fighting mind. He objects to being described as “brilliant.” The model of Brandes as a portrait-painter of ideas and individuals is Velasquez, because “Velasquez is not brilliant, but true.”

Yet he is brilliant and lucid, and steel-like, whether writing of Shakespeare or Lassalle. An ardent upholder of Taine and the psychology of race, he contends that in the individual, not in the people, lies the only hope for progress. He is altogether for the psychology of the individual. Like Carlyle, he has the cult of the great man. The fundamental question is—can the well-being of the race, which is the end of all effort, be attained without great men? “I say no, and again, no!” he cries. He is a firm believer in the axiom that every tub should stand on its own bottom; and in our earthly pasture, where the sheep think, act, or vote to order, the lesson of Brandes is “writ clear”: To myself be true! that truth set forth with double facets by Ibsen in Peer Gynt and Brand. Also by Emerson. Beware of the Bogy—the cowardly spirit of compromise, with its sneaking prudent advice; Go around! For mobs and mob-made laws Georg Brandes has a mighty hatred. He, too, is a radical aristocrat whose motto might be: Blessed are the proud of spirit, for they shall inherit the Kingdom of Earth! With his Hebraic irony he stung to the quick the spiritual sloth of Denmark. His life was made unpleasant at the Copenhagen University; but he had behind him the younger generation. He knew that to write for the intrenched and prejudiced class would be a waste of ink. He exploded his verbal bombs beneath the national ark and blew sky-high stale and false ideals. He became a national figure after he had been recognized as a world critic. Not the polished writer that was Sainte-Beuve, not the possessor of a synthetic intellect like Hippolyte Taine’s, Brandes is the broadest-minded man of the three, and upon his shoulders their critical mantles have fallen. Agitated as he was by the war—his letters to me were full of references to it—he was philosopher enough to plunge into the profoundest work. He has finished two studies on such divergent themes as Goethe and Voltaire. Let us hope both books be given an English garb and speedy publication.