Page:The Bohemian Review, vol2, 1918.djvu/153

 to be alone. He is closing his eyes, but against his will the irritating light of the sun is penetrating thru his closed eyelids. Where his horizon was bordered by the mountains of his native land, he sees the sparkling mirrors of distant rivers and the continents behind the oceans. The whirl winds, circling around the Earth, carry the glowing sparks of burning distant cities on the roof of his house. The silence of jails and scaffolds penetrates the glowing interior of the Earth before reaching him. The clatter of falling beams of the collapsing scaffoldnigscaffolding [sic] of the mysterious structure, and the blows of the axes gives him no sleep. The night has been changed into the confused cries of those who ask and of those who answer from an immense distance. But the passion for life was never so tragically powerful, nor has it ever seized the nations in waves so violent—never before has the illusion of life appeared more dazzling to the disinherited, the gift of breath and of passion more magnificent, the body richer and more wonderful, the grapes that ripen in the sun sweeter and more desirable. As if all the gleamings of the beyond had filled the world and now were sparkling from waters, from the trees and blossoms, from the clouds and from the eyes. But with the same force with which there is growing in nations the passion for the Earth, there grows the knowledge that without the co-operation of the millions, nobody will taste the fruits of her hidden orchards. The highest joy of the Earth, the intoxication of the victory of a brotherly power, the joy over the joy of brethren, remains unknown and inaccessible. The human body was moulded by the past; whole regions of his senses, turned into the night of the cosmos, were not yet reached by our light; the sensibility for the higher forms of love, which would become conscious of the joy of all as of its own, has remained undeveloped. Like before the denizens of another world, the multitudes withdraw in anguish before the sweet will of the saints, whose hearts like fruit on the sunny side of the orchard had ripened earlier than the hearts of the multitudes. To the child, to the woman and to the people is turned the hope of the race. It is necessary to enlarge the body in the region of the subconscious, to make it more spiritual, purer, more resonant and clairvoyant. With a painful instinct, which expresses the mysterious law of growth on the Earth, man is beginning to realize that everything which tends to change our management of material things, everything that tends to strength, purity, gentleness and the freedom of the senses is a spiritual effort, a struggle for beauty, the last struggle on the earth, pointing into an unbounded future.

In this work for the new man art has for ages been engaged; sweetly and submissively as the sun, or passion and death. ThtatThat [sic] which is visible to the creative spirit, is visible only in the light which is emanating from the higher life of the cosmos. In the fairy tales of the days gone by, in the myths, in the secret science a well as in the dreams which are so subtle and unbelievable that it was necessary to create a new language of symbols, music and forms, to enable us merely to indicate them, art has for centuries kept alive the hope of the conquest of the elements by the kindly power of the spirit. Omnipresent in its deep longing for splendor, like a gardener under all suns it has planted new gardens for the lovers, and on the same looms it wove women’s garments and garbs of divine worship. It has not stopped even before death, and from the lips compressed in her silence it longed to guess the answer. It was the omnipresent author of festivals, the architect of the illusion of life, the master of silence, into which can be heard the rustle of stars; it was the creator of sorrows, and a bitter critic of the Earth.

But the creation of beauty is not confined to the works preserved in books, pictures, sculptures and edifices. It lies in the whole plan of life; it is an omnipresent sensitiveness to the magnetic poles of the spiritual earth, and the creation of a language is equally a work of art as is the creation of a kingdom. In every man there is constantly active a hidden artist; in the sparkling of the moments like under the lightnings of a creative chisel he works on the unity of personality. The life of the hero, and the saint, like every work of art, grows out of inspiration, which means a decision in the higher sphere of life, where death is not counted upon, and out of the hard way of the will, hypnotized by the radiance of the aim. The dream of the lover, prisoner, sailor, or the northenernortherner [sic] and the believer is a poem, and not less so that it was sung in silence. The unceasing soring tide of love is changing into music the movements of the bodies of maidens, and the counties, nameless actors and creators of new gestures are discovering, with