GERHART HAUPTMANN

“Primarily in recognition of his fruitful, varied, and outstanding production in the realm of dramatic art”.

It was cold and raining.  We had a scenic ride across the lake from Lausanne but it seemed Geneva was not anxious to have us.  It seemed we walked for hours finding no lodging within our budget.  We settled for shabby if pricy accommodation and vowed to be on our way the next morning.   For no particular reason we set our next stop as Lugarno, a small city on a lake in the south east of Switzerland.  It proved to be one of the most beautiful and enjoyable spots on our trip.  I was there again walking the mountains and looking down on the lake from the Chapel of San Salvatore as I read Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Heretic of Soana.   Agreed, I had been there so mental depiction was easy, still Gerhart Hauptmann has the uncanny ability to place the reader in a vivid setting to hear a gripping story. 

After the fantasies of Kipling, Lagerlöf and Maeterlinck it is perfectly reasonable that the Swedish academy should take an 180˚ turn to the father of German naturalism.   It is not surprising that this youngest son of a Silesian innkeeper should write works which shocked both the German Kaiser and the Catholic Church.  His homeland moved from one sovereignty to another throughout his life.  He was born a German in a land which was to become a part of Poland and The Czech Republic.  After a youth in which he explored careers as a sculptor, agriculturalist, and historian, a bout of sickness sent him to his desk.  His short stories Carnival and Lineman Thiel drew attention.  In 1888 he went to Zurich to study psychology.  While there he wrote the play Before Dawn which made him famous over night.  He became “Hauptmann (captain) of the wild band of naturalists.”  There followed a long string of dramas, his masterwork The Weavers became famous throughout Europe.  The characters of his plays spoke in the appropriate dialect.  Scenes were set in environments recognizable to the people in the seats.  Often this was not a pleasant entertainment.  The Weavers shows the grinding poverty and exploitation of the people who weave cotton webs.  The weavers are shown as real people with all the dreams, loves, and faults of our specie.  When pushed too far the destitute rebel and the privileged react.  Far too often, as in Hauptmann’s depiction, the reaction results in the death of the innocent. 

After reading The Heretic of Soana I was hooked on Hauptmann’s yarns.  I use that term deliberately as he draws you in with a storyteller’s skill and keeps you there.  The Heretic of Soana is a story within a story set in an Alpine paradise.  The writer goes into the mountains where he meets a very primitive goatherd wearing glasses.  This incongruity struck me as odd but I put it aside.  Very shy about visitors, this man of the mountains prefers to live with his charges in a hidden cave on the side of the mountain.  On first meeting the goatherd he was surprised when the conversation turned easily to Seneca, the Argentine, and Swiss politics.  On the last visit the hermit asked if he could read a manuscript entitled “The Mountain Shepherd’s Tale”.  This story is of a young priest, recently assigned to local parish, who was pressured by his bishop to minister to a clan of goatherds on a remote mountainside.  When he met the family he was horrified to discover that not only were they not baptized, it was an incestuous relationship, the parents of the children being siblings.  He tried to draw them into the church but the mayor of the town would not have “these wicked, mangy beasts” in his town.  The bishop directed the young priest to go to the mountains and take personal cognizance of the situation.  The bishop did not know of the beautiful daughter who had captured the young priest’s heart.  A large part of the middle section of the tale is the besotted cleric’s denial, struggle, and rationalization with this threat to his vow of celibacy.  So she might complete the necessary catechism class, the girl enrolls in the school at his church.  One evening as he accompanied her home the inevitable happens in beautifully written detail.  The next few paragraphs are an equally vivid depiction of the young priests struggle.  His calling and his love are at direct odds.  The manuscript ends “He felt terrible piercing pains until, when it grew dark, he set out, inwardly shouting with happiness, on the road to the same small island world that had united him yesterday with his beloved and on which he arranged a new meeting with her.”  The visitor was outraged that the tale stopped short.  What had happened to the two lovers?  Did their affair remain secret or become known in the community?  The stream of questions was interrupted by the sound of a child’s singing.  The song was answered by the equally lovely singing of what could only be the child’s mother.  A beautiful blond girl leads her goats around the hillside followed by her mother.  “Was this not the man-woman, the Virgo, the Syrian goddess, the sinner who fell out with God to yield herself wholly to man, her husband?”  The former priest, now the heretic of Soana, smiled as he greeted his wife and daughter. 

Carnival, Lineman Thiel, and The Apostle are three novellas about madness.  Each draws the reader into a vivid scene which is as natural as the snow falling outside my window as I write this.  Carnival is the madness of youth and irrational self-assurance.  A young sail-maker and his wife are the life of every party in their community.  They have sufficient for the day and thanks to a miserly mother who lives with them they are confident of future resources.  One night, crossing a frozen lake on a sled returning from a masquerade party, they become lost in the fog and fall through the ice to their death.  Simple, if tragic, story you think?  Not the way Gerhart Hauptmann tells it.  This man builds the tension from the first sentence.  You know something terrible is going to happen by hint after hint until the ending has all of the shock value of anything written by the likes of Poe.

The Lineman Thiel is a different kind of madness.  We meet Thiel, a conscientious, quiet, hardworking railroad employee responsible for a section of track and a crossing not far from the village where he lives.  His first wife died leaving him a retarded son on whom he dotes.  To care for his son he marries a local milkmaid who turns out to be a shrew who misuses the boy.  One day she brings their baby and the boy out to the section of track to till a nearby garden patch.  Ignoring the boy he gets onto the track and is run over by the train.  Pushed beyond sanity by grief Thiel murders his wife and child then sits n the track waiting for the next train.  One paragraph is not nearly sufficient to describe the beauty in this tragedy.  Please if you have time for Hauptmann try this one. 

The apostle tells from the inside the decent into madness of a person too deeply immersed in religion.  It is also beautifully written, the reader is drawn into the madness.  It is far too easy to see in this allegory persons I have known.

Gerhart Hauptmann’s naturalism is a breath of fresh air.  It is all there but done in such a way as not to insult the intelligence.  I did not read enough of his plays to get a good picture of this work.  I did very much enjoy his novellas.  I can see why he received the 1912 Prize.

Now, for the first time, we leave Europe and travel to India.  Rabindranath Tagor was a Bengali poet, novelist, short-story writer and playwright.  It is time for curry and Darjeeling tea.

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

“In appreciation of his many-sided literary activities and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy which reveal, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deep inspiration, while in a mysterious way they appeal to the readers’ own feelings and stimulate imaginations”

As I started reading The Blue Bird it struck me I was looking at The Nutcracker in reverse.  The play opens in the cottage of a woodcutter.  They are not poverty stricken but far from rich.  It is Christmas Eve and Mummy Tyl has just tucked her son, Tyltyl, and daughter, Mytyl, in for the night.  Of course, as soon as she leaves the room the children start to talk about Christmas.  They are drawn to the window where they can look across the street into the home of some rich children at a lush Christmas party.  Maurice Maeterlinck writes it so well you can see the magnificent Christmas tree gleaming in their eyes and feel their mouths water over the sweets and cakes.  Clara and Councilor Drosselmeyer could easily be across the street.  Obviously, I was on my way into another fairy tale.  It then occurred that I had been encountering a lot of fairy tale type fantasies recently.  Kipling’s Jungle Book fits as does Selma Lagerlöf’s The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.   In alternating years (1907 Kipling, 1909 Lagerlöf, and 1911 Maeterlinck) the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to spinners of fantasy yarns. In the United States one of our greatest story tellers, Mark Twain, gave us A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court (1889), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), and The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896). Why?

The history of the period may hold a clue.  In 1909 Albert Einstein was invited by the University of Zurich to the newly created Chair of Theoretical Physics.  His 1905 Special Theory of Relativity along with Max Planck’s introduction of quantum theory shook Newtonian physics and introduced randomness.  With modern art, Darwin and Freud uncertainly, probability and mystery were introduced to the people of the early 20^th Century.  The Wright Brothers and German Zeppelins were active; the idea of humankind soaring above the ground had moved from fantasy to reality.   In 1909 the Vatican beautified Joan of Arc setting her on her way to sainthood.  The next year they imposed a compulsory oath against “modernism” on all priests.  And to top all of that in 1910 the Earth passed through the tail of Halley’s Comet.  The horizon for humankind was moved to infinity.  It was a time to glory in imagination.  In his plays Maurice Maeterlinck delighted in taking us to enchanted places. 

Born to a middle class family on August 29, 1862, he was sent off to be educated as a lawyer.  Having a weak voice and ascetic bent he was unsuited for the bar and soon went to Paris to write poems.  His mysterious drama Princess Maleine, which made his name on the Paris stage, was followed by a string of mystical dramas.  So popular was his work Claude Debussy composed music to fit the magic.  The Blue Bird (1911) is regarded as the peak of his career.  With its performance in Paris, Maeterlinck was mentioned as the Francophone Shakespeare.  

The Blue Bird is a morality play.  While the children are delighting in their imaginings of the Christmas party across the way a fairy enters and asks for a blue bird which she needs to cure her daughter.  Mytyl tells her that her brother has a turtle dove in a cage.  Tyltyl objects and becomes possessive.  The fairy refuses the bird as not sufficiently blue.  She puts a little green hat with a diamond in the cockade on Tyltyl’s head.  She instructs him to turn the diamond so he can see the past or the future.  In the world they enter inanimate objects come alive and their pets are humanized.  It is easy to see that Maurice Maeterlinck was a dog lover; his characterization of the family bulldog is absolutely delightful.  I am sure if a dog could talk this would be what it would say. The cat is a sly and conniving sneak; my opinion of all cats.   The children’s guide is Light who takes them into a shadow world in search of the Blue Bird which the fairy demands.  Along with Dog and Cat they are accompanied by Bread, Sugar, Fire, Water, and Milk all humanized and with the characteristics animate forms of these substances might take.  On their quest they meet their deceased grandparents, Trees (each specie with a different personality, all resenting them as the children of a woodcutter), Animals (again with specific personalities), The Luxuries (actually the vices), The Happinesses (the virtues), and Children preparing to be born (they are required to prepare their own destiny).  All the while they are subject to the machinations of the various characters, usually with the cat as the primary schemer.  Maeterlinck gives very detailed costuming and stage directions.   The sets are very vivid and should be executed by Marc Chagall or Salvador Dali.  At the end of the play Tyltyl and Mytyl are back in reality and the fairy is their neighbor Berlingot whose daughter is sick.  All of the birds they gathered on their quest either died or turned the wrong color so Tyltyl offers his captive turtle dove.  This bird turns a bit bluer and the girl experiences a miraculous cure.  Everybody lives happily ever after. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this play.  There is a 1918 silent and a 1940 Shirley Temple film version of the play available on Netflix.  I have them both on my list and am looking forward to watching them.  I imagine the 1918 film will be closer to the real thing.  And yes, it is from this play that the expression “Blue Bird of Happiness” emanates. 

As Maurice Maeterlinck aged he came to prefer nature to the company of his fellowman.  He fled Paris for the countryside where he took a keen interest in birds, insects and flowers.  These inspired some of his most beautiful pieces.  In 1900 he published The Life of the Bee.  This was followed by The Intelligence of Flowers (1907), The Life of the Termite (1927), and The Life of the Ant (1930).  I remember well my father’s uncle who kept bee hives in the yard adjacent to the house where I now live.  My sixth grade teacher was an avid apiarist.  When my brother proposed keeping bees I enthusiastically joined in.   After several years the rest of my life got in the way.  My brother remains committed; I feel guilty.  With that background I enjoyed every minute of The Life of the Bee.  I liked it so much I bought a better copy which I gave to my brother as a Christmas present.  Maeterlinck makes it clear that he is not writing a “how-to” book.  To his mind those have been written.  He is writing a philosophy of the life of the bee.  In an awestruck voice he describes the complex community of the honey bee.  He speaks of “the spirit of the hive” and “the spirit of initiative” to be found among these vital insects.  After presenting two theories on the queen’s role in controlling the gender of the larva he says, “… Though I do not for a moment pretend to decide which is the more correct; for indeed, the further we go and the more closely we study, the plainly is it brought home to us that we merely are waifs shipwrecked on the ocean of nature; and ever and anon, from sudden wave that shall be more transparent than others, there leaps forth a fact that in an instant confounds all we imagined we knew.”  Such humility speaks to the nobility of the man.  Maurice Maeterlinck is on my list of writers to which I will return. 

Get out the beer, sausages and Beethoven; we are back in Germany with Gerhart Hauptmann, playwright and novelist. 

PAUL JOHANN LUDWIG von HEYSE

“As a tribute to the consummate artistry, permeated with idealism, which he has demonstrated during his long productive career as a lyric poet, dramatist, novelist, and writer of world-renowned stories”

Well into his 80’s when he received notice of the Nobel Prize, Paul Heyse said he was pleased because he could say without too much pride: “What I have done cannot then be entirely bad”.  To my mind his humility is well founded.  He wrote numerous books of poetry, seven novels, forty plays, one hundred and fifty novellas, translated the complete poetic works of five Italian poets, and edited anthologies of Italian and Spanish songs.  From this sizable opus I was able to find two novellas which were translated to English.  On reading them I understand why he slipped into obscurity.  To my mind his greatest honor is he laid the ground work for Danielle Steele, Nora Roberts, and hundreds of anonymous Harlequin writers. 

One of the commentators cited L’Arrabbiata (the Angry Woman, 1853) as among his best work.  While a student he visited Italy where he met a beautiful dark-haired girl named Sorrento whom he transformed into Laurella, his first and best known heroine.   She is beautiful, composed, and self-sufficient.  She makes a living for herself and her mother by weaving silk and spinning yarn which she sells to noble women on the island of Capri.  Her mother is invalided as the result of beatings received from her now deceased father.  Having witnessed this abuse she has decided that a man shall never be a part of her life.  On this occasion she shares a boat from the mainland to the island with a priest on his way to visit a heavy contributor to his parish.  It is through her conversation with the priest that we get the background.  We meet Antonino, the oarsman, but he remains in the background until he carries the priest from the boat onto the beach.  When he returns for Laurella she has already hitched up her skirts, jumped into the water and waded ashore.  God forbid that the handsome, bashful, caring, and smitten boatman should lay a hand on her.  The priest plans to spend the night on the island.   Laurella instructs Antonino to return to the mainland, she will find her own way home.  Antonino waits all day in the hot sun.  When she arrives and they set off he offers her some oranges, as she has had nothing to eat.  She resolutely refuses.  When he proposes she take them for her mother.  She claims they have plenty of oranges, thank you!  Antonino is overcome and declares his passion reaching out to touch Laurella.  She reacts by biting his hand, ripping the flesh so badly blood gushes onto the floor of the boat.  She then jumps into the sea and begins to swim for shore.  Antonino knows it is too far to shore for her to swim.  He apologizes for his impulsiveness and pleads, for the sake of her mother, she get back into the boat.  She does and he rows her to shore where she jumps out and heads home.  The wound is deep but Antonino is too contrite to seek help.  He returns to his humble cottage where he is soon in the throws of a fevered sleep as the result of the infection.  Very late on the moon lit night he awakes to soak his pounding hand when he hears someone at the door.  Standing outside is Laurella with a basket of healing herbs she collected from the mountain.  She cleans and dresses his wound.  She is leaving when Antonino observes tears on her cheeks.  Afraid he had offended her Antonino begins to apologize but Laurella sobs, rushes into his arms and declares her undying love for this honest boatman.  I think we are to assume they married, had sixteen children, and lived happily ever after. Gag!

The Wine Guard is much longer and way more complicated but it follows the form.  The handsome and honorable Andree is forced to guard the vineyards because he is hated and spurned by his mother, the Black Lassie.  His beautiful sister, Lassie, loves him dearly and visits him surreptitiously.  The ten o’clock Masser (assistant priest, the one who holds the second Mass) is wise and loved by all.  The noble family of the area is headed by Joseph Hirzer.  They own the vineyards and have influence in the valley.  Joseph has a drunken loutish son, Franz, who wants to marry Lassie, and a pure and chaste daughter, Rosine, who is Lassie’s best friend.  Also living with Joseph is Anna, his saintly sisters revered by the whole community, who is a friend and adviser to Andree and Lassie.  The major problem for the wine guard is local soldiers who steal grapes and damage vines.  One night in the course of his duties Andree strikes a soldier with his halberd and leaves him for dead.  Racked with guilt and fearing reprisals, he commits himself to a local monastery.  A few years later, when the Black Lassie died, Lassie comes to the monastery pleading with her brother to reenter the secular world to care for her.  After much soul searching he leaves the monastery and they disappear together.  The whole community tries to find them but they seem to have dropped off the face of the earth.  A year later Andree appears at the home of the ten o’clock Masser asking if he is truly the son of the Black Lassie.  He had heard that his mother brought him down from the mountain and he is a foundling.  On this information he ran away with Lassie and they married.  When she became pregnant she was racked with guilt and insisted on returning to their home and confessing their sin.  Oh, the angst is overwhelming.  When Franz hears that his desired is married to her “brother” he gets drunk and rouses the community to attack the sinners.  And now the truth comes out.  His aunt, the saintly Anna, was involved with a Lutheran gentleman (Oh, the shame) whom she was forbidden to marry.  Her friend, the Black Lassie went with her into the mountains where the baby was delivered.  On returning to town the Black Lassie and her husband claimed the child as their own.  At this crucial moment the saintly Anna claimed her son and, confessing herself as the greatest of sinners, she went to the church arm in arm with her son and her new daughter-in-law where the ten o’clock Masser declared everything to be in order and of course they lived happily ever after.

Did you get the idea this was not my favorite author?  I suspect the sheer mass of his work or some political pressure was involved in this award.  My advice; don’t bother.

Now for the first time to Belgium, specifically Flanders.  I am not sure why but the name Maurice Maeterlinck rings a bell.  I must have seen or read one of his plays sometime in the past.  Claude Debussy composed music to accompany one of his most successful plays.  That makes choice of background easy.  As to snacks it will be gauffers, Belgium waffles served with whipped cream and fruit.  (I will need to spend a bit more time in the gym) 

SELMA LAGERLÖF

“In appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination, and spiritual perception that characterize her writings”

I confess to being an avid mystery reader.  There are a few authors the local library sets aside for me when they arrive.  Each is enjoyable in a special way.  Robert Parker writes excellent dialogue.  Janet Evanovich’s characters are vital and hilarious.  James Lee Burke’s stories keeps me riveted.  Selma Lagerlöf’s forte is landscape.  Her word pictures of the environment in which the stories play out put you there.  I long to go to Sweden and Sicily to see the countryside she describes in the two works I read.  Of course, in the case of some of her work that was the whole point.

By 1909 the Swedish Academy was ready to award the Nobel Prize in literature to a woman and one of their own.  Selma Lagerlöf’s family was landed from her mother’s side and well off by the standards of the day.  It was a happy family with a loving father and a practical mother.  Born with a malformed left leg, she compensated with a rich and powerful imagination.  All through her life mobility was a problem.   When others were more active she read and gathered folk tales and local stories.  Her family was able to travel, from which she gained additional perspective.  Soon she was viewed as the muse of the community, writing poems, speeches, and short stories commemorating local and family events.  It was a speech, in verse, composed for a local wedding that brought her to the attention of Eva Feyxell, a well known feminist.  She declared anyone with such talent should develop it to serve female emancipation.  It was arranged for her to go to a girl’s school in Stockholm.  A whole new world opened to this country girl.  She was an excellent student and when she completed her studies she took a teaching position at a girl’s school at Landskrona.  She soon established herself in the community and was constantly active with day and evening classes, militant feminist meetings and work for universal peace.  Secretly she spent every night writing.  When her father died in 1885 it was discovered there were extensive debts part of which was the cost of her education.  She began to publish for additional money.  Her life goal was to satisfy her debt and eventually save enough to buy back the farm where she grew up.  She succeeded in this and much more.

I choose her two best known works: The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and The Miracles of the Antichrist.  If seeking contrast, I could not have chosen better.  The Wonderful Adventures of Nils , written late in her career, was to be used by 9 to 11 year old students as an introduction to the history and geography of Sweden. The Miracles of the Antichrist, set on the island of Sicily, contrasts the humanistic miracles of socialism with the reality of Christianity. 

I have wanted to go to Scandinavia and now I am even more anxious.  The Wonderful Adventures of Nils very literally gives you a bird’s eye view of a beautiful and vibrant nation.  Nils is a scamp.   On this occasion he refuses to go to church so his father assigns Bible verses for him while the rest of his family worships.  Not particularly interested in the task, his attention is easily diverted by an elf that jumps from behind a cabinet.  Nils captures the elf in a butterfly net.  When he tries to extort more from the elf he becomes an elf himself.  Not only does he find himself much smaller, he can now understand the language of animals.  In the barnyard he finds the gander lured by the calls of wild geese migrating north to Lapland.  When the white goose rises to join his wild brothers Nils jumps on his back and goes along for the ride.  Not only does he see the country and its people, he is tested both physically and morally.  When the geese migrate south they stop at his home farm.  For good works he is converted into a taller, more knowledgeable, and wiser young man.  The piece is written in vignettes perfectly suited to the classroom.  It is a comfortable read.

One of the commentaries on Selma Lagerlöf claims Nils was inspired by Kipling’s Jungle Book.  The Miracles of the Antichrist was inspired by a trip to Italy where a tour guide explained that for many years homage had been paid to a counterfeit figure of the Infant Christ.  While reading the Introduction to this novel I kept thinking, “This must have been where Monty Python got the inspiration for The Life of Brian”.  Lagerlöf had parallel images of the Christ child, both able to perform miracles.  Monty Python had children born in adjoining stables, both inadvertently founding movements.  The parallels ended with the first book of this three book piece when it became a strongly stated piece of humanist literature.   From there on it reminded me of the “Stone Soup” story, in which a leader puts a stone in a pot of water and suggests the residents of the village add this and that until a delicious soup feeds the community.  In this case the goal is a railroad to a remote village on Mount Etna.  A local impoverished noble woman is able to inspire the poor people of her town to build the railroad by inspiring belief in a Christ child image which only we know is fake.  Lagerlöf sticks to her short passage style which makes for easy reading.  The Italian names and chopped format lead to need of a program to keep everybody in line but it is worth the effort.  The story is good, but the description of scenery around Mount Etna is thrilling.  It is not hard to visualize the white almond blossoms on the black lava fields or the sun rising over the mountain.  For that alone the book is worth reading.

For 1910 we go back to Germany.  Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse was a Prussian who lived in Bavaria and loved Italy.  He was extremely prolific but must not have been very enduring for I cannot find a translation of any of his poetry.  I did find two novellas and the Franklin and Marshall library has a translation of one of his plays.  An article I read said he did not like Wagner, who was very popular at the time.  As he was one to look back I will read him to Bach.  Rheine wine and sauerbraten might be just the thing for an obscure German writer from the Prussian nobility

RUDOLF EUCKEN

“In recognition of his earnest search for the truth, his penetrating power of thought, his wide range of vision, and the warmth and strength of presentation with which in his numerous works he has vindicated and developed an idealistic philosophy of life.”

Time to introduce a character almost lost to history.  Harald Hjärne, a history professor at the University of Uppsala, gave the presentation addresses at the award ceremony for the Nobel Prize in Literature on three occasions: as the director of the Swedish Academy in 1908, and as chair of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy in 1913 and 1919.  The vast majority of the early presentation addresses were given by C. D. AF Wirsén, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy.  It would appear Harald Hjärme advocated a literal reading of Alfred Nobel’s will, as on each occasion he emphasized “idealism”.   In his will Alfred Nobel established the Literature Prize for “excellence in works of an idealistic tendency.”   Hjärne made it clear in his Presentation Address that this should be the standard.  “This literature makes use of whatever art and science can offer, and from it mankind ‘profits the most’ precisely because it mirrors the ideal truth without any regard for the useful.”  From this quote you can assume that the winner of the 1908 Nobel Prize is the antithesis of his predecessor Rudyard Kipling.

Rudolf Eucken is not easy reading.  The two works I chose, Ethics and Modern Thought and The Meaning and Value of Life, required careful and repeated reading.  Eucken is concerned with the precise meaning of his words.  Two of his earliest works are History of Philosophical Terminology (1879) and Images and Similes in Philosophy (1880).  The first of these remained in print until 1960 and is still available among the 171 books by Eucken offered on Amazon.com.  There is an enormous body of work still in print from this thinker who continued to write until his death in 1926. 

I was captivated by the concept that true idealism is the process of defining and understanding the present.  The meaning of life is the struggle with the conditions in which the thinker finds himself.  When out of harmony with the way of life offered by his environment his choices are to retreat into the past or forge something new into the future, the latter Eucken defines as life.  In Eucken’s day naturalism was popular.  As practiced it was withdrawal from life into some environment seen to be of a more “pure” nature.  Eucken saw naturalism as the antithesis of idealism.  He believed there was “a spiritual life superior to man” which can be achieved through the experience of living.  He called what he taught “activism”.  Truth is to be found through the activity of living and the experience of life rather than pure intellect, as found in academe.  He had little time for dominate social institutions such as government and the Church.  He saw them as taking on a rigid form, reducing themselves to lifeless dogmas and observances.  Indeed, to him the word “civilization” mainly designates social order while “culture” is education “from within” by which man as a whole is uplifted.  Rudolf Eucken writes much about a “spiritual life” which is achieved through the process of living.  There is an inner process of life by which humankind is able to raise itself above itself and achieve a civilization which will continue to propagate itself.  I was deeply impressed and will value these small books. 

In Ethics and Modern Thought Eucken introduced me to the four types of morality from which I am asked to form my ethics.  First, there is “Religious Morality” which comes down from the past and is founded on a holy will, superior to the world.  Religion links humankind’s destiny with attitude to moral obligations.  Although a very powerful motivation to the moral life, in higher civilizations religious morality is supplemented by “The Morality of Reason” developed by society’s philosophers.  For them morality is based on humankind’s own reasonable nature which seems to demand recognition of a universal law and voluntary submission to it.  The morality of reason incites a proud independence of spirit which exalts humankind above everyday life.  It is to this morality we owe the rise of science.  “The Morality of Work”, a product of the Industrial Revolution, directs effort towards some object which must be perpetrated; it impels us to value the object for its own sake and treat it according to its own requirements.  Work has become a primary factor in education and culture, even, in our time, disrupting the structure of the family.  In the work culture the individual must subordinate himself completely to the demands of the whole.  There is no doubt the morality of the marketplace has a profound influence on our lives.  “Social Morality” proceeds from the immediate relation of human to human.  Once we were confined to geographic and religious communities which were homogeneous.   In our world we instantaneously share experience with millions of our brothers and sisters across the globe.  We become increasingly independent and interdependent at the same time.  It is the influence of this interdependence which needs to be understood.  There is a union and a commonality with every other human being.  Modern communications has expanded the concept “Social Morality” beyond anything Eucken could have imagined at the beginning of the 20^th Century.  If the concept of four moralities forming your ethics catches you like it did me I strongly recommend you find a copy of Ethics and Modern Thought to explore this brilliant thinker’s concept of the interweaving of them in our lives. 

I do not have the space to go into The Meaning and Value of Life in the kind of detail it deserves.  Instead, I list quotes from the book which struck me as profound.

1.     “… unless faith in some lofty ideal infuse zest and gladness into every department of our activity, we cannot realize the highest possibilities of life.”

2.     “Religion [in the traditional, ecclesiastical form] despite all it has effected, is for the man of today a question rather than an answer.”

3.     “The Yes may be much less obvious than the No, but without the Yes the No would be unthinkable.”

4.     “Freedom is essential if life is to have meaning.”

5.     “Thus all genuine spiritually involves an achievement – an achievement in which the whole life is engaged.  Life, from this point of view, is no mere unwinding of thread from a reel; it is a constant introducing of new material, a process of incessant creation.”

I hope this little taste whets your appetite sufficiently to send you to this thinker who has offered me many moments of quiet consideration.   He is well worth the effort.

I look forward to a big change; from a German philosophy professor seeking the meaning of life to a Swedish schoolmarm seeking to introduce the beauty and history of Sweden to her elementary school charges.  I think I will be able to stand the shock.  For background music it will be Wilhelm Stenhammer’s Serenade for Orchestra.  I will pass on the meatballs and try to make some blabärssoppa, a blueberry soup served cold.  As it is a beautiful Indian Summer Day, I will settle under the cherry tree in the back yard with Selma Lagerlöf’s The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. 

RUDYARD KIPLING

“In consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas, and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world famous author.”

The following characters are a vital part of me: Mowgli the man-cub and his friends Bagheera the panther and Baloo the bear, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi the heroic mongoose, Dan and Peachey the men who would be kings, Kim, Harvey and Dan the captains courageous, and the best of all men Ganga Din.  If you have never met my friends please allow me to introduce you.  Rudyard Kipling’s characters are some of the most vivid in literature.  It is not an accident that Disney and other Hollywood studios have used them as the basis of films.  What is most remarkable about this creative genius is these characters are presented in different mediums.  The Jungle Book is children’s lit.  The Man Who Would Be King is a short story.  Ganga Din is a rhyming poem.   My introduction to Kipling was in elementary school.  Our teacher read the poem Boots as an example of Imagery Poetry.  The cadence of the poem mimicked the activity being described.  I could see lines of solders marching.  For reasons I cannot explain it stuck with me.  Kipling wrote short stories, children’s literature, rhyming verse, free verse, novels, autobiography, science fiction, hymns, and social commentary.  If there was a way words could be arranged this man was a master of the genus. 

Born in Bombay, India on December 30, 1865 to a family immersed in the arts he spoke the language of the porter and his ayah (nanny) more fluently than English.  His immersion in India, and more profoundly the British Empire, survived an education on the British Isles.  At the age of seventeen he returned to India where he first wrote for and then edited several newspapers.  As a reporter he traveled over the north of India absorbing the culture and observing people.  The Man Who Would Be King is as much about running a newspaper in India as it is great adventure.  It was during his tenure as newspaper editor that he was first published.  Departmental Ditties and Plain Tales from the Hills ,while popular in India, were greeted enthusiastically in England and his career as a writer was launched.  New found fame allowed him to leave India for England sailing east.  After a stop in Japan he traveled across the United States and on to London where he settled.  Never in good health; he particularly feared blindness as weak eyesight plagued him from childhood.  In 1892 he married a United States citizen and settled in Vermont.  Some of his most productive years were here.  Kim, The Jungle Books, and Captains Courageous all came from his time in the United States as did three children.   On returning to England he was accepted as the Empire’s most honored poet.  When offered the position of Poet Laureate and a knighthood Kipling refused.  It was at this time the family began spending English winters in South African summers.  In Cecil Rhodes, England’s most aggressive imperialist, Kipling found a kindred spirit.  During the Boer War he traveled over the war zone as a reporter.  He continued to the end of his life traveling and writing.  When his son John was lost without trace in World War I he became a member of the War Graves Commission and was personally the moving force behind the monument to the Unknown Soldier in Britain.  He died at the age of seventy on January 18, 1935.  His ashes are buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abby among the lights of English literature.  Rudyard Kipling is still one of the most read authors in the English language. 

Alfred Nobel was very specific in his will that, “prizes be awarded without considerations of nationality.”  He was naïve.  In a world arming for what would be World War I political considerations had to enter the Committee’s considerations.  Prizes had been awarded to two Frenchmen, a German, a Norwegian, a Spaniard, a Pole , and an Italian.  Since 1903 the English had been pushing Algernon Swinburne, in 1907 they made one last effort as their candidate was aging.  Much to everyone’s surprise the Nobel Committee rejected the British Society of Authors’ choice and selected Rudyard Kipling, the youngest person to ever receive the honor.   I willing admit I had never heard of Swinburne, the   Committee made a wise choice. 

As you may have noticed I am something of a fan.  Rudyard Kipling has been in my blood since childhood.  Among Rudyard Kipling’s friends was Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts.  It was from Mowgli that the Cub Scouts were named.  I once was a Wolf Scout.  Kipling’s work is all through the Scouting movement.  So vivid is his writing that the young mind cannot help but be caught up in the adventure.  With age comes appreciation of poetry and perspective.  As an adult I am impressed with Kipling’s presentation of the ugliness and futility of war.  He knew the common solder and vividly depicts the grim and painful life in the ranks.  It is ironic that we are again caught up in Afghanistan which provided the setting for many of his most powerful pieces.  Santayana was right, “Those who fail to learn from history will be forced to repeat it.”   Maybe on this subject all we need to do is read Kipling. 

Below is the poem Boots.  This is not the best of Kipling, nor is it my favorite.  It is an example of the creativity of this brilliant mind.  The first time I heard it and every time since I can see a column of soldiers marching across barren land to a destination unknown.  Please, if you have not read Ganga-din, Danny Deever, or Recessional spend the few minutes necessary to look them up.   For a short while you will be in the company of a great man in a pivotal time. 

We’re foot-slog-slog-slog-slogin’ over Africa

Foot-foot-foot-foot-sloggin’ over Africa

(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin’ up an’ down again!)

There’s no discharge in the war!

Seven-six-eleven-five-nine-an’ twenty mile today

Four-eleven-seventeen-thirty-two the day before

(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin’ up an’ down again!)

There’s no discharge in the war!

Don’t-don’t-don’t –don’t look at what’s in front of you

(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin’ up an down again)

Men-men-men-men-men go mad with watching em

An’ there’s no discharge in the war!

Try-try-try-try-to think o’ something different

Oh-my- God-keep-me from goin’ lunatic!

(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin’ up an’ down again!)

There’s no discharge in the war!

Count-count-count-count-the bullets the bandoliers

If-your-eyes-drop-they will get atop o’ you

(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin’ up an’ down again!)

There’s no discharge in the war!

We-can-stick-out-‘unger, thirst, an’ weariness

But-not-not-not-not the chronic sight of ’em

(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin’ up an’ down again!)

There’s no discharge in the war!

‘Taint –so-bad-by-day because o’ company

But night-brings-long-strings-‘o forty thousand million

(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin’ up an’ down again!)

There’s no discharge in the war!

I-‘ave-marched-six-weeks in ‘Ell an’ certify

It-is-not-fire-devils, dark or anything,

But boots-boots-boots-boots-movin’ up an’ down again!)

An’ there’s no discharge in the war!

In 1908 the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Rudolf Christoph Eucken.  I never heard of the guy, but gather he was a German philosopher.  This looks like a long haul; the score from Götterdammerung seems in order.  How much beer and how many bratwurst will it take to get through The Meaning and Value of Life?

GIOSUÉ CARDUCCI

“Not only in consideration of his deep learning and critical research, but above all as a tribute to the creative energy, freshness of style, and lyrical force which characterize his poetic masterpieces”

Giosué Carducci was a man of his time, very much a part of his historic context.  He was born in the northwest corner of Tuscany on July 27, 1835, at that time there was no such entity as Italy.  What is now Lombardy, Veneto, and the rest of the northwest corner of the boot was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the rule of the Hapsburgs.   The rest was divided between seven different kingdoms; the most powerful, the Papal States, controlled Rome and a large chunk right in the middle of the peninsula.  Carducci’s father was an itinerate physician and an avid patriot.  Forced by economic circumstances to move about the country, he longed for the glory which was the Roman Empire.  Doctor Carducci was so outspoken in his contempt for the divided country he was viewed as a crank and was tossed about on the waves of change sweeping the country.  Finally tossed ashore in Florence he sent his hereto home-schooled son, just turned 14, to a Church run school.  The father must have been an excellent teacher for the son blossomed, passing all of his examinations with flying colors in record time.  A brilliant student, who often found university professors mediocre and pedantic; he immersed himself in Italian literature and began writing poetry.    In 1855 he qualified for his doctoral degree.  For a short time he taught in a secondary school during which time he published Rhymes a book of 25 sonnets, two ballads, and a eulogy for Italian patriots.  It was this work that earned him in 1860 an appointment as professor of rhetoric at the very prestigious Bologna University where he remained until retirement in 1904.  During all of this time his outspoken political views kept him in constant trouble.  From 1859 to 1879 his writings were closely linked to the causes of the republican, anti-clerical patriots.   He was a Latin and Greek scholar and viewed his country through the lens of the glory which was ancient Rome.  In his eyes the corruptor of his time, and surely the inhibitor of unity and liberty, was the Roman Catholic Church.  The pontiff at the time, Pius IX, sought to solidify his power when in 1864 he issued the encyclical Quanta Cura which censured nationalism, naturalism, socialism, freemasonry, and claimed the church’s complete control of education, culture and science.  In addition Syllabus errorum denounced freedom of conscience and worship and declared the Church’s completely independent of state control.  It was under this same pope the Vatican Council proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility.  Carducci became a Freemason and devout anti-cleric.  Indeed, so far did he go in this direction that some of the commentators I read called him a pagan and Satanist.  There is no doubt he flaunted his contempt for the Roman Church.  For many he stepped over the line with is poem Hymn to Satan.  This long poem is a product of his youth described by some as a toast rather than a hymn.  There is no doubt it is in the face of the Roman Church.  In the presentation address for the 1906 Nobel Prize the secretary of the Swedish Academy said, “In fact, Carducci’s Satan has an ill-chosen name.  The poet clearly means to imply a Lucifer in the literal sense of the word- the carrier of light, the herald of free thought and culture, and the enemy of that ascetic discipline which rejects or disparages natural rights.”  The poem is far too long to include in this essay.  The last two stanzas give the reader an idea.

All hail to thee, Satan!

Rebellion, all hail

Hail, power of reason,

Avenge and prevail!

To thee arise incense

And holy vows paid,

Thou, Satan, hast vanquished

The god by priests made.

This was a man who was willing to speak out for right of every person to freedom of thought and conscious.  He was in love with the ancient image of his homeland and adverse to any who would hinder its glory.   What he wrote and did glorifies the human state and the dignity of man, I see him as a humanist rather than a pagan or Satanists.  Of course, many in our time make no distinction between the three; I am sure this would make Giosué Carducci sad.

He lived to see his beloved country united.  And he lived to see his work honored by the Nobel committee, but only just.  In 1906 age and infirmity prevented his going to Sweden to receive the prize, a few months later he died.  The more I read of the man the more I liked him.  The more of his poetry I read the more I felt like an uneducated oaf.  The man is a classicist who makes constant reference to Roman and Greek history and mythology.  I am sure if I had the time and the inclination to spend hours over each poem delving into references book several times with each stanza I would have a greater appreciation for Carducci’s work.  I don’t and am not so inclined.  I appreciated that which I understood.  I particularly enjoyed The Ox and I offer three stanzas from Love’s Canticle.

Through crops that deck the plains with tender green,

Through vines that sloping terraces o’erclimb,

Through lakes and distant rivers’ silvery sheen,

Through woods that clothe the snowy peaks sublime;

Through cottage smoke gay curling in the sun,

Through clattering wheels of mills that full and grind,

Arise a thousand hymns in unison,

A thousand voices in one prayer combined:

“Hail, weary peoples of the human race!

Too much we suffer and too much we hate.

Nothing can die, though all things change apace:

Love! Fair is earth and holy future fate.”

Oh boy, Oh boy, Rudyard Kipling, a writer which I have know since I can remember.  I was in elementary school when I first read his poem Boots.  It stuck with me and although I know almost everything about Kipling is related to India, I have always associated him with South Africa.  So I will get out the Biltong and Rooibos and settle in for great adventure.   Kipling is the poet of the empire so it will be Edward Elgar on the CD player.